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DUTY 



TWELVE CONFERENCES TO 
YOUNG MEN 



BY 

Rev. William Graham 

I' 



ii« 



JOSEPH F. WAGNER 
NEW YORK 






T. B. COTTER, Ph.D. 

Censor Deputatus 



Sitqidmatur 

*JOHN M. FARLEY, D.D. 

Archbishop of Neiv York 



New York, August ii, 1910 



Copyright, 1910, by JOSEPH P. Wagner, New York 



©CLA27395'6 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Meaning and Source of Duty ....... i 

11. The Limits of Duty ......... 12 

III. Conditions of Duty ......... 21 

IV. Law: Outward Rule of Duty, and Its Administrators . . 30 
V. Conscience : Inner Rule of Duty -39 

VI. Its Sanction .......... 49 

VII. Our Duties to God 60 

VIII. Duties to Parents 70 

IX. Duties to the Church . 79 

X. Our Duties to the State • 91 

XL Personal Duties (Soul) loi 

XII. Habits of Duty II2 



DUTY 

CONFERENCES TO YOUNG MEN 



I. MEANING AND SOURCE OF DUTY 

As the best goods are said to be packed in small parcels, so great 
thoughts are often expressed in short words. Such words as God, 
the soul, life, death, duty are of no great length, yet to the thinker 
how deeply rich and suggestive they are. World-wide controversies 
rage, ever have raged, and presumably ever will rage, round their 
meaning, origin, and application. Now, it is to the last of these 
little words, vis., duty, that I mean to draw your attention, in a few 
homely discourses, during the next twelve months. The use of the 
word duty, by all men, in all times, and in all tongues, is witness to 
its reality and importance. Though a dry topic, yet this fact, as 
well as the close connection of duty with our happiness here and 
beyond, offer sufficient apology for its choice. To-day I propose 
to speak : 

I. Of its meaning. 

II. Of its source or origin. 

I. There are many words in a language apparently easy and 
commonplace, and yet so subtle, elusive and many-sided as almost 
to baffle analysis and definition. Of such is the word duty. It is on 
everybody's lips; and yet it is not very easy to put its meaning 
clearly and tersely in other words. Speaking loosely, duty is what 
we ought to do. It implies what is due by us to others, and is said 
to sum up what we morally owe to God, our neighbor and ourselves. 
It tells us, in one short term, what we are bound, i. e., what we 



2 DUTY 

ought to think, say and do, by virtue of the great moral law or law 
of God. 

Thus, the noun duty and the verb ought embody the whole science 
of ethics, from a rational, and of moral theology, from a Christian 
standpoint. The word duty reminds us of a debt, which, as honest 
men, we must do our best to pay. For a moral being to shirk duty, 
i. e., to refuse to pay his life-debt, when he both can and ought to, is 
dishonest, a failing to pay what is strictly due. Debt never gets off 
the conscience till paid ; so it is with duty, it is a kill- joy and a mar- 
feast, ever reminding us, as long as it is left unfulfilled, that we 
are placed in this world, not to do what we like, but what we ought. 
To have joy in life we must make peace with it, as "with our enemy 
in the way," for it is the sworn enemy of pleasure unless we come 
to terms with it. 

Though duty connotes law, it is distinct from it. Duty is sub- 
jective and personal, law objective and impersonal. Laws in the 
moral order are rules of conduct emanating from some being en- 
dowed with authority to frame and have them carried out. Duty is 
compliance therewith. Our attitude toward all just laws affecting 
us should be one of duty. Spiritually duty is the same as obedience 
to lawful superiors. In the abstract, it may be described as the 
binding force of what is morally right. It is defined by Webster as 
"That which a person is bound, by any natural, moral or legal obli- 
gation, to do or refrain from doing." Like most other words, it is 
used by transfer of meaning in other senses. Thus, it is often 
limited to service, civil or military, applied to certain forms of 
work, taxes and the rest; but we here use the word duty in the 
sense above described, i. e., as compliance with the moral law, dis- 
charge of the obligations binding on us by the law of God and its 
legitimate extensions. 



MEANING AND SOURCE OF DUTY 3 

To get a good hold of what is meant by the term duty, it will help 
us to reflect that law means order or regularity in any and every 
sphere of action — material, intellectual, or moral; hence we speak 
of the laws of nature, the laws of mind or thought, and the laws or 
rules of conduct. God as supremely intelligent and moral, by the 
very force of His nature, must wish order to be observed, or kept, 
in nature, mind, and conduct. "Order is heaven's first law." By 
the light of common intelligence we perceive this. A well-balanced 
mind revolts against disorder and confusion in every department, 
and feels an instinctive desire to put all the "crooked things of life" 
straight. Science, art, truth, conduct are all a perception of the 
need of order. To break God's order entails evil. If we break the 
laws of nature we may bring on ourselves sickness or death ; if we 
run counter to the laws of thought, we fall into error, and if we 
infringe those of conduct or duty, we fall into the greatest evil of 
all, sin. The moral order, which it must be God's will for every free 
intelligent being to observe, is called the moral law, the rules of 
which it is our duty to keep, and which, indeed, form the sum of our 
duty. Now this moral rectitude, this straightness of soul, this good 
conduct or behavior, is the object of duty, or rather is duty itself. 
It makes what we call an all-round honest man, and an "honest man" 
is truly "the noblest work of God." As Matthew Arnold says, "Good 
conduct is nineteen-twentieths of life." All moralists hold this view, 
whatever their opinions, as to the basis or origin of duty. Deflec- 
tion from duty, or ordered conduct, is living down and away from 
the fulness of life. Morality, another name for duty, is admittedly 
the highest function of man. Physically, a man may be as strong 
as Hercules ; intellectually, he may rival Solomon or Plato, and yet 
if he is immoral, i. e., undutiful, unmindful of the rules of good con- 
duct, he is condemned, and rightly condemned, as false, as untrue 



4 DUTY 

to the lofty ideal of human nature, as we feel it should be, and as 
we know it to be wrong and sinful not to be. The moral plane, or 
plane of duty, is felt to be the highest, as indeed it is the chief meri- 
torious plane of life. We do not blame a man for being in body 
weak or ugly, or mentally stupid; but we do blame him for being 
immoral or undutiful. 

Again, duty, it must be remembered, is quite the antithesis of 
pleasure or self-interest; nay, it is often in complete antagonism to 
both. No doubt it would be both agreeable and useful for a poor 
man, with a starving wife and child, to find and keep the purse of a 
Morgan or a Rockefeller, dropped accidentally in the street, and 
yet duty, plain, commonplace duty, compels him to return that purse 
without abstracting a single cent, even though the owner were 
neither to know of the loss nor would perceptibly suffer from the 
loss if he did. Duty is hard, stern, unrelenting. It is pitiless and 
merciless to passion, pleasure, and in some respects to self-interest 
alike. It tells us emphatically, through the voice of conscience, to 
do what is right and shun what is wrong, be the consequences what 
they may. When duty is in question, mere calculation of gain or 
pleasure is irrelevant! As well weigh spirit against matter, or 
virtue against gold, as duty against carnal pleasure, or worldly 
wisdom. For duty, I repeat, means what is due, by you and me, to 
God and our neighbor, and that in justice we ought and must pay. 
However high the standard of Christian duty may be, yet what in 
duty we are bound to do or omit, that, with God's grace, we can 
both do or omit. 

II. So much for the meaning of the term duty. We have now to 
examine whence springs its binding force. Why should I be morally 
forced to do what is right, and avoid what is wrong? All moralists 
own that we ought to do our duty, but differ as to why, or on what 



'i*. 



MEANING AND SOURCE OF DUTY 5 

basis this moral obligation rests. Is the foundation of duty within 
or without ourselves? Is man autonomous, i. e., a law to himself; 
merely seeing the need of ordered conduct, and acting accordingly, 
without any reference to or dependence on any light, law, or au- 
thority other than that furnished by reason? Is duty or morality 
independent of a divine Lawgiver enlightening reason and binding 
conscience ? 

Remember, this is not an idle, useless, or merely dogmatic ques- 
tion. It is vital to the very notion or idea of duty. If duty originates 
with self or other men, if there is no right to command outside of 
or beyond ourselves, why do we feel stung with grief and remorse 
on leaving duty unfulfilled ? In fact, if duty is based only on reason, 
without reference to external authority, why should there be any 
such thing as duty at all? Why should I, irrespective of all conse- 
quences, obey any one power of my soul rather than another ? Why 
obey the law of reason any more than the law of lust? Why, if so 
inclined, should I not be free to follow my animal instincts in 
preference to my rational? If self has no master to dictate what is 
right or wrong, in the line of duty, then all that self approves of 
may be right and justifiable — free love, suicide, and the rest. If 
there is no element in duty but what is human, then it is based or 
resolved into force, on the one hand, for the sake of public order; 
or, on the other, license, i. e., unrestricted freedom to do what one 
likes — in other words, there is no such thing as duty. "In those 
days there was no king in Israel, but everyone did that which seemed 
right to himself" (Judges xxi, 24). The result of this craze for in- 
dependent morality, i. e., duty not based on dogma, is seen in the 
attack directed by unbelievers to-day, not so much on speculative be- 
lief, as against the practical authority of Christian duty. Formerly 
the idea of duty or conduct, as proclaimed by Christ and His 



6 DUTY 

Church, was deemed impregnable. Rationalism even admitted our 
moral code as the most perfect treasure of the age, even when trac- 
ing it to a merely human origin by way of evolution. To-day in 
romance, in poetry, in drama, duty is assailed as an undue interfer- 
ence with liberty, and pleasure put to the front. "Let us eat, drink 
and be merry, for to-morrow we die" is an ideal of life commonly 
taught both on and ofF the stage. The assault on dogma is no 
longer limited to Christian belief, but extends even to Christian 
ethics, i. e., to duty. As an appeal to passion, against pure reason, 
and clad in the garb, or rather mask, of science, it meets with con- 
siderable success among the crowd, and is a veritable trap to the 
unwary. 

Now to escape this disaster we must get a thorough idea of the 
groundwork of duty from a Catholic, and, let me add, rational point 
of view. First of all, there is no special sense or faculty of duty. 
It is rooted in the understanding or reason — reason, not independent 
of, but subject to and enlightened by God the Supreme Reason. 
Duty or morality is not the quality of an action, like color, weight, 
or shape; but is known and wilful conformity with a law, founded 
on reason and binding in conscience. As well say that the eye is in- 
dependent of light for vision, as to say that our reason, through 
which duty is apprehended, is independent of God — the "Light of 
lights." Duty is rooted in the felt obligation to obey God or His 
lawful representatives; and the voice of conscience enforcing it in 
the same act implicitly reveals God as lawgiver or supreme framer of 
duty. Duty is thus, in its origin, the voice of the Eternal; and it is 
mere sophistry, a juggle of words and ideas, to try to make it out a 
creation, or outcome of the human mind. It sprang from the 
inmost life and supreme reason of God: and was traced in rude 
outline on the heart, or reason of man, as a rule of conduct peculiar 



MEANING AND SOURCE OF DUTY 7 

and suitable to free self-determining beings. Its essence is to mold 
that conduct not in conformity with the passing ephemeral fashions 
of time, but with a higher standard of law, fixed, unchangeable, and 
universal — the moral law, tersely put in the Ten Commandments, 
which sum up the whole duty of man. Now this is only found in 
basing duty ultimately on the supreme reason of God, recognizing 
order, and willing, which is the same as decreeing, it to be ob- 
served. Duty divorced from religion, and not based on God, loses 
all its force to sway the heart and mold the whole conduct of man. 
If not rooted in God, it dwindles, at best, into a cold, lifeless branch 
of human law, held up only by brute force. As experience shows, 
duty reared not on the fluctuating reason or varying opinions of men, 
but on the transcendence and independence of God, can alone sus- 
tain moral effort in the mass of mankind. Duty that does not strike 
root in the divine element of religion deals only with outward acts, 
leaving untouched the whole field of motive, which we all feel to be 
the very soul of duty. Gain, or greed, or lust, or other base motives 
may be at the back of deeds of heroism apparently, yet they rob 
these very deeds of the sacred name of duty. 

Hence nearly all nations have sought for the sanction of the 
duties imposed on their citizens in religion. However false or 
visionary, yet what appeared to them as the "high will of heaven" 
seemed the only solid foundation on which to raise their laws and 
base the duty of the people called upon to observe them. 

But it may be said that people are and were moral, i. e., obedient 
to the call of duty, without either knowledge of or reference to God 
whatsoever, nay, that there are many moralists who perhaps do not 
believe in God at all. Buddhists and others have a very strict code 
of duty, without belief in a personal God of any kind. Any man, 
moreover, may be honest and dutiful without being religious. 



8 DUTY 

The reply is obvious. We sing and play without adverting to the 
theory of sound on which music is based. We think and will, and 
otherwise energize, without paying heed to the soul in which these 
actions are rooted. We live in a house without minding the founda- 
tions on which it is built. By reflection and analysis we come to 
recognize that the source of moral truth, as of all truth, is in the 
divine Mind. We likewise feel in the impulse of conscience the 
divine Will commanding this moral truth or order in conduct to be 
kept. To do right it is not necessary to advert to its origin. Even 
if there were no human mind or reason in existence, it would still 
be eternally true and binding that "good is to be done and evil 
avoided." 

Duty is not, be it remembered, an arbitrary enactment of the 
divine Will. It lay in the vision of the divine Mind. Duty as 
moral truth precedes it as volition. Conduct is not moral or im- 
moral, not commanded or forbidden, because God willed it to be so ; 
but He willed the moral law, or order, or duty, or law of nature, to 
be obeyed because in His divine mind He saw it to be right. The 
perception of duty, or obligation of living up to moral order, as the 
standard of conduct is prior in the order of thought, i. e., antecedent 
to God's commands that it should be observed. Duty, therefore, is 
not only conformable to right reason, which is also divine reason, 
but is also the expression of the divine Will. He must wish us to 
act in conformity with reason, and this will of His is law in our 
regard. A breach of duty is a breach also of the divine Will or law. 
It is thus a sin. Hence it follows that sin or moral evil is more 
than an infraction of right reason. It is an offense against Grod. 
Men at all times and in all religions have felt and taught the trans- 
gression of duty to be a violation of the order willed and approved 
by God. The remorse and pain felt by conscience in a breach ol 



MEANING AND SOURCE OF DUTY 9 

duty bears witness to this. No doubt the perception of duty varies 
both in nations and individuals, according to their intelligence, edu- 
cation, and religion ; still it is at least rudimentary in all — sufficient 
to make them answerable for their conduct, and so deserving of 
praise or blame. 

The feeling of sinfulness or wrong doing that arises in the soul 
when we wilfully fail in duty proves clearly its divine origin. If 
duty had no higher source than reason or custom, we should feel 
no remorse in secretly breaking it. We may infringe all the laws 
of good breeding, etiquette, good taste in the world, we may violate 
all the rules of science and art, and yet never feel a twinge of re- 
morse; but we can not transgress the laws of justice, we can not 
steal, lie, or blaspheme, without feeling that we have done morally 
wrong, that we have violated the will of God, who planted the 
sense of duty within us. It is only the divine element in human 
law, i. e,, the divine sanction, or approval of it, that makes us ever 
feel guilty of a breach of duty in transgressing it. 

Duty, therefore, as I said, is based on the divine Will command- 
ing order to be kept ; and the rules that go to make up this order 
form the moral law, often called the divine law, or law of nature. 

The perception of this law in general outline, called the knowledge 
of right and wrong, good and evil, is traced on the mind of every 
human being endowed with reason, and, more than aught else, dis- 
tinguishes man from the beasts. Its observance raises us immensely 
above them, just as its transgression degrades us below them. What- 
ever they do, they remain innocent ; we, by a breach of duty, become 
sinful. For we are free, they are not. They are the slaves of their 
animal instincts ; we are, or ought to be, the masters of ours. There 
is no compulsion, no restraint in the law of duty. We are free to 
keep or break the moral law, but we can not escape the conse- 



lo DUTY 

quences of either course. We are still by duty under the law, even 
when disregarding it. Duty ever binds. We may do as we like; 
but we still remain bound to do as we ought We may slay, steal or 
slander ; but always at our own risk and peril. No lawgiver, much 
less the Supreme Lawgiver, who has written His law on our hearts, 
will allow his laws to be broken with impunity. Pains and penalties, 
remember, ever follow a free transgression of duty. Every law, as 
we shall see, has its sanction. 

By way of conclusion, I may say, that two thoughts have engaged 
our attention up to the present — the meaning of duty and the founda- 
tion on which it rests. Divested of technical language, duty is keep- | 
ing the moral order or law made known to us by enlightened rea- 
son and conscience. It is thus the harmony of human conduct with 
divine law. Its proximate basis is the will of God expressly order- 
ing this law or order to be observed. To trifle with the order 
called the law of nature, is to invite swift and stern retribution: 
water drowns, fire burns, poison slays, without pity or mercy; and 
so the violation of the higher order of duty brings on us the terrible 
evil of sin — prelude and threat of untold disaster to follow. 

Can anything better be said of duty than that it is doing God's 
will ; can anything worse be said of not doing it than that such con- 
duct is a violation of His will? Duty, therefore, sums up all that is 
worth living for in this world. 

Two paths lie before young men to-day : the path of duty and the 
path of pleasure. They are free to choose either. One is doing 
God's will, the other is doing our own. The one is living up to the 
best that is in us, the other is living down to the worst. 

Speaking as "one less wise," putting the matter on the low level 
of worldly wisdom, duty pays ; pleasure leads surely and fatally to 
bankruptcy both of body and soul. Except as a rest from toil and 



MEANING AND SOURCE OF DUTY ii 

as a stimulant to duty, pleasure is fraudulent. It can never lawfully 
be an end, only a means, to something better and higher. It will 
land any young man who takes it as his aim and main object in life 
into weariness, disillusion, disappointment and despair. A soul 
given over to it has only before it a vision of lost time, wasted op- 
portunities, blighted hopes, the bitterness and sorrow that in- 
variably haunt the pleasure seeker of living, and having lived, an 
idle, worthless, godless life. Duty, no doubt, has its trials and 
pains ; but they brace up and strengthen the soul. They bring peace 
and well-being and the respect and esteem of one's friends. The 
sweetness of pleasure is but honeyed poison ; the weariness of duty 
is soon past; its memories are ever sweet and its reward never- 
ending. 



12 DUTY 



II. THE LIMITS OF DUTY 

It is no easy task to exhaust the contents of the word duty. We 
have spoken of its meaning and the foundation on which it rests. 
To-day we propose to say something of its Hmits, or rather, extent, 
which, in this matter, is nearly the same thing. Duty covers the 
whole field of conduct, and is, therefore, conterminous with it. 

While still on the threshold of our subject, it is advisable to 
correct some palpable, though very common, errors about duty. 
First of all we must not forget that duty has a positive or affirmative 
side as well as a negative. To a Catholic it means more than merely 
"ceasing to do evil." We must also "learn to do well." "To enter 
the kingdom of heaven" it is not enough to have empty hands, they 
must be full. In the weighing of the soul in judgment, duty, on its 
negative side, i. e., the mere absence of evil, would make a poor 
show in the way of assets against our life's liabilities. We can not 
be said to do our duty unless we are able to say not only that we 
avoid wrong-doing, but also "leave not undone what we ought 
to do." 

The young man who is said to do no harm, is far, as yet, from 
having done his duty. He may be, withal, a worthless and mis- 
chievous person. So far he is but an empty vessel at best. 

Owing to the long prevalent, though now utterly discarded, be- 
lief in the worthlessness and uselessness of good works, quite a 
distorted notion of duty gained ground in many quarters. To pay 
no heed to personal efforts, but simply to appropriate the righteous- 
ness of another, was an easy way of "fulfilling all justice," i. e,, of 
doing one's duty, but it did not long hold. Good sense and sound 
theology were opposed to it alike. And yet in practise this irra- 



THE LIMITS OF DUTY 13 

tional view of duty is acted upon quite as much, if not more, in 
Catholic circles as in Protestant. Not merely individuals, but whole 
classes and nations, are judged and lost, even in this world, through 
it. The reformation in the north of Europe, the corrupt renaissance 
and revolution in the south, were the direct outcome of the clergy 
and people forgetting or failing to act on the principle that duty 
has its positive as well as its negative side. This error, whereso- 
ever prevalent, spells decadence and degeneracy. 

Again, duty is not to be confounded either with ability or hero- 
ism. They are quite distinct. A man may be heroic and clever, 
and yet anything but a model of duty. Some of the greatest 
scoundrels in history were both heroic and clever, and yet highly 
immoral in the sense of undutiful. So far from acting on high 
motives — the very soul of duty — narrow professionalism, gain, 
greed, or glory, were their main incentives to action. Able they 
were, patriotic, too, perhaps, but models of duty, in the Catholic 
sense of the term — the only sound one, rationally, be it observed — 
never. And yet nothing more common even in books on duty than 
to find the names of soldiers, sailors, scholars, statesmen, financiers, 
and merchants, praised as heroes and martyrs to duty — a quality 
which, if the truth were known, they most lacked, except in a very 
narrow sense. Their names are trotted out, as if success or emi- 
nence in one's business or profession were the real marks of duty, 
whereas they are no proofs that their lives were those of duty at 
all. Duty is simply doing what we ought to do. Hence, even high 
sanctity is not exactly duty, as it is doing more than one is bound 
to do by the law and light, boih of reason and faith. Indeed, strictly 
speaking, there are no heroes or martyrs to duty, or rather, we are 
all, or ought to be, heroes and martyrs to duty, because everyone 
is bound, i, e., ought, to do his duty in life. 



14 DUTY 

Whether we die on the battlefield or amid the tender cares of 
home, we should all die martyrs to duty. For duty is being where 
one ought to be, and doing what one ought to do. All else is 
accidental. 

It is to be observed, however, that all are not called alike. Each 
post in life has its duties. Light, talent, rank, occupation, modify 
and determine what one has to do, and ought to do; but all men, 
without exception, have their duty to fulfil ,in their respective 
spheres. None are exempt. Duty is universal; it applies to all. 
The form, not the substance, of duty changes. Howsoever exalted 
one's position, be he king. Pope, ruler, or aught else, duty follows 
him and claims observance. Indeed, one reason why we, who stand 
on lower and safer ground, should not envy those who occupy 
these dizzy heights, is that their responsibilities, in other words, 
their duties, are higher and more exacting than ours, and a fall 
from them entails more serious consequences. One thing, there- 
fore, is certain, that none are outside the limits of duty. What- 
soever shape or form it assumes it binds us ; and the only difference 
that God, from whom it receives its binding force, discerns among 
His children, is the manner in which each one pays the debt he 
owes in duty. In face of duty there is no favoritism. All are equal. 
Each and every human being is bound to do what he ought to do. 

So universal is this debt of duty that in its primary precepts it 
can not be dispensed with, even by God himself. For to do right 
and shun wrong is founded in the very nature and essence of 
things, the opposite of which would be a contradiction and unthink- 
able, and thus irreconcilable with God's attributes. To understand 
this we must bear in mind that there are certain truths and laws 
founded on unchangeable relations, such as geometrical truths or 
those of number; and which we can not conceive to be otherwise 



THE LIMITS OF DUTY 15 

than they are. They do not depend on the will of God, but were 
ever present as true in the divine Mind. The divine Will or action 
does not, and can not, terminate in unreality or nonentity. He 
can not contradict himself. There are certain other facts or laws, 
however, such because God wills they should be so — such as the 
laws of nature, attraction, movement, chemical combination, and 
the rest. These may be conceived as otherwise, had God so or- 
dained. It is not unthinkable that the present distribution of land 
and water, or the shape and character of plants and animals on our 
earth, should be reversed, if God so willed it; but on the supposi- 
tion that He made man a moral and intelligent being, we could 
not, without entangling ourselves in a contradiction, conceive God 
not willing that a man should escape. He is necessarily a God of 
order, and duty is the ordered conduct of a rational creature — the 
living up to and in accordance with his faculties. Duty, in fact, is 
the being and living true to our nature. 

Moral truth, i. e., the principles of duty, are absolute and un- 
changeable. The different views that have prevailed as to what is 
right and wrong merely indicate that the application of these 
truths or principles has varied, not the principles themselves. Cruel 
and vicious actions, or what appear so to us now, have, in some 
times and states of society, been regarded as right, but never cruelty 
or vice as such. By a law of his nature, man ever seeks good in the 
abstract, even though the thing is bad in the concrete. Sinftfl 
pleasure is only indulged in because apparently good. In the same 
way, if to do a wrong thing is, or ever has been, deemed a duty, it 
is done not as wrong, but as a matter of duty. 

But, you may say, if even God can not exempt a man from doing 
his duty, how is it we hear so much in the Catholic Church of dis- 
pensations from certain religious duties, prayer, fasting, hearing 



i6 DUTY 

Mass, and the rest ? In reality, this does not touch the point of duty 
at all. The general law of doing what we ought to do, i. e., our 
duty, remains intact. The Church, like any other society, endowed 
with authority to make laws, can dispense, not from divine, but 
from human laws, of her own framing ; and it may be even a duty 
to accept and act upon such dispensation. The broad principle of 
duty ever binds, even though special conventional forms of it are 
dispensed with, changed, or modified. As I said, the form and par- 
ticular application may vary; but the essence of duty remains ever 
the same. Though in certain circumstances we may not be bound 
to hear Mass on Sundays, abstain from meat on Fridays, or fast in 
Lent, we are not released from duty for all that. The human ele- 
ment in duty ceases, but the divine remains. Indeed, conflicting 
duties often meet, when it is sometimes difficult for conscience to 
decide which binds. One thing is certain in duty, "we must obey 
God rather than man." The human must ever give way to the 
divine. The bell rings out, for example, for holy Mass, or any 
other form of divine service on Sunday, but a child falls ill, or a 
fire breaks out, endangering human life and property. Now com- 
mon sense and the voice of conscience tell us that the divine duty of 
brotherly love is more binding than the human one, though grave, 
of worshiping God at a particular hour on a specified day. Duty 
binds on that occasion as strong as before, but under a new form. 
Life, therefore, is a network of duties. We live in a world 
where it presses in upon us from every side. We can no more get 
away from duty than from the planet we live on. We are, of course, 
free and may discard it, but it binds notwithstanding. It is not 
limited by space, though, like the air and the soil, it may vary. We 
find duty awaiting and imperatively claiming observance in every 
region of the globe — north, south, east, and west. We may change 



THE LIMITS OF DUTY 17 

our home and country, adopt new professions, enter into fresh 
complicated relations with others, but wherever we go, or wherever 
we are, there duty stares us in the face. Men differ in habits and 
views, they are at variance as to art, politics, literature and re- 
ligion, but all agree as to the imperative claims of duty. That duty 
binds the conscience, is thus a truth, recognized by all mankind 
whatsoever their differences in other respects. They may call 
things by wrong names, as we think; one may look upon as a duty 
what another would call a sin; Christians may eat as clean what 
Jews and Brahmins shrink from as unclean; what may be thought 
right in one place, or age, is deemed wrong in another; but is not 
all this a confession of the very power and universality of duty? 
Duty makes all things sacred, and is a world-wide avowal of the 
force of moral law and the existence of a divine Lawgiver, who 
alone can bind the conscience by the universal sense of duty. Light 
to distinguish wherein it lies in certain complex circumstances, or 
grace from without to act up to a high standard of it, may be alto- 
gether wanting, or at least vary much, in strength and intensity; 
still the knowledge of it, conveyed by conscience as a controlling 
and impelling force, is never altogether absent from any normal 
healthy mind. 

Again I repeat, it is no valid objection to the universality of duty 
to say that men's ideas of duty differ with time and clime — that 
duty conveys one meaning to a Catholic, another to a Protestant — 
one thing in one age, or country, another in another; for wherever 
there is the use of reason there can never be perpetual darkness in 
regard to the main obligations of the moral law and man's duty to 
observe them. All men, whether "Jew, Greek or Barbarian," have, 
and ever had, a standard of right and wrong, and owned it was 
their duty to live up to the requirements of this standard. 



i8 DUTY 

But not only is duty universal in point of space, i. e., all the 
world over, it is so, too, in point of time. It binds always, at least 
on its negative side. This is the same as to say that a man should 
ever conduct himself well. He must be always on duty. He may 
he off work, but never off duty. There is always something that a 
man ought to he and do, and that is duty. The best form of recrea- 
tion, Mr. Gladstone used to say, and act on, is a change of work. 
In regard to duty there is, morally, no other choice. To be free 
from duty, if it means anything, means simply a change of duty. 
The duties of public life give way to those of the home. The duties 
of the tradesman, the clerk, the teacher, the workman, have ceased ; 
but those of the father, the husband, the son, or the brother, begin. 
A man's work is done for the day. He comes home from mart, 
or farm, or office, or factory, fagged out and tired. With a sigh 
of relief, perhaps, he says the day's duties are over. But are they? 
Far from it. A new set of duties face him there. There is some- 
thing that he owes or ought to be to his parents and neighbors, or 
wife and children. There is a duty of kindness, patience, good 
example, to be discharged, just as important as the duty he has left 
behind. A knocking off duty, as is sometimes said, no more means 
a cessation of duty than a change of air means a stoppage of breath- 
ing. Ever present, duty follows one all through life. 

A man, for example, is born rich, or, by a stroke of good luck, 
rapidly grows rich. He never did and never needs to do a stroke 
of hard work in his life for a living. Has he thereby escaped duty ? 
Is he free from all responsibility? Far from it. Like every one 
else, he owes a debt of duty to God, his Church, his country, his 
family, and all depending on him. He, too, is in this world meshed 
in a network of duties. Increase of wealth, indeed, brings increase 
of duties. And if a man neglects these duties, lives as if in nowise 



THE LIMITS OF DUTY 19 

indebted to God or his neighbor, then he is dishonest and fraudulent. 
He shirks his work, his Hfe duty, and is no better in the sight of 
almighty God than an ablebodied tramp, who has work to do, and 
won't do it. 

What is called the day of rest comes round. We are glad that 
the duties tying us to counter, mill, or office, are over; but even 
Sunday brings its duties too — the most important of all, those spe- 
cially dealing with public worship, such as the hearing of holy Mass, 
and the rest. There is no day of rest from duty — as well escape 
the air around us as fly from it. What seems farthest away from 
it — sleep, pleasure, amusement — must all be regulated by duty. Or 
to take another instance : A man is stricken down with illness. He 
has to knock off work and resign his post. All life and energy seem 
gone. Brain, and nerve, and muscle, strike work, and he is simply 
fit for nothing. Yet he is fit for duty, nay, bound to it. It follows 
him into the sickroom, tells him to be patient and resigned to God's 
will under suffering ; and show himself grateful to the devoted wife, 
sister, or nurse, who out of a sense of duty also devote themselves 
to caring for him. 

Or, again, opportunities are offered us of easily winning fame, 
wealth, and pleasure, at the expense of principle. A word has 
to be said, a deed done, that duty tells us is wrong. The tempter 
is at hand to whisper, "All these things that eye and heart crave for 
shall I give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me." To whom 
must he listen? The call of the tempter, or the call of duty? No 
choice is left a true man. He must follow duty, cost what it may. 
Temptation to, and opportunities for, wrongdoing abound. What 
is to hinder us enjoying or profiting by them? No human eye sees. 
No human voice or arm is raised to interrupt our unholy work. 
But there is one voice that no human being can silence — the voice 



20 DUTY 

of conscience in defense of duty, crying out, even though it be in 
the wilderness, that we must do our duty, ever do what is right, 
and ever shun what is wrong. 

Duty, therefore, shadows us all through life. It has no limits of 
time or place. It is in extent boundless. Like God, it is present 
everywhere. It has a sentry in every human soul watching over its 
due performance, and ever giving a warning signal when neglected 
or badly done. This still, small voice within us is a high witness not 
only of the Spirit of God within us, but also reminds us of the ever 
present and ever pressing calls of duty. Even in the midst of our 
sinful excesses it ever reminds us of what we ought to be and are 
not. It reminds us of the urgent duty of repentance. Seeing that 
we can not escape duty, let us make up our minds as reasonable 
beings to accept the inevitable. We can not prevail against God — no 
more can we against duty. 

Let us divest ourselves of the idea that a life of duty is a life of 
dulness and hardship. In reality it is a life of pleasure, and the 
only possible one. Our own experience, as of all the world, testifies 
to the "hard ways of sin," which every life is that is not one of 
duty. But it must be duty, as we have described it to-day, in the 
full extent of the term — and not limited to some favorite or con- 
genial form of duty. What happiness is comparable to that of the 
man who feels he is doing his duty, and can look back on duty 
already done? All misery is the result of duty left undone by some 
one or other. Let us gird ourselves, then, to the great task of doing 
our duty, in thought, word, and deed, to God, our neighbor and our- 
selves. In truth, there are no limits to duty. The limits of duty 
are the limits of life. 



CONDITIONS OF DUTY 21 



III. CONDITIONS OF DUTY 

To-day I propose to speak of the conditions required for duty. 
Let me frankly say that I speak of duty in the full, round, Catholic 
sense of the term. I am not speaking to pagans, or even university 
scholars, but good believing Christians. Duty is good conduct, tlte 
soul of life, and not culture, which is merely varnish. No doubt 
man is born a moral, i. e., dutiful, just as he is born an intelligent 
being, and more or less conducts himself as such; yet the theory 
and practise of duty that go to the roots of conduct are found only 
in Christian ethics. Away from religion, it is a mere wreck. To 
divorce duty from God is pulling it up by the roots. When it will 
wither and die is only a question of time. Christ as man even was 
admittedly the world's greatest moralist, and He has put morals, 
i. e., duty, under the care and guardianship of the Church. In mat- 
ters of conduct, she is the high court of appeal, as well as in those 
of faith. 

And happily so, because to judge of recent contributions to moral 
science, the world is going back rather than forward. 

Just as Christ came to perfect, not to destroy, the law, so has He 
elevated and spiritualized the natural elements of duty taught by 
reason. The old Greek and Roman moralists were, and are, our 
pedagogues leading to Christ. They drew nearer, immeasurably 
nearer, the divine fountains of duty in Him, than those who boast 
to-day of founding a school independent of "God and His Christ." 

Unaided human reason fails to teach even, and much less enable 
man to live up to, the standard of duty to which he aspires. He is, 
therefore, naturally supernatural — a state for which he was destineS, 



22 DUTY 

and in which our faith tells us he was created. Hence we put down 
grace as a necessary condition for fulfilling one's Christian duty. 
Light, liberty and grace are thus the three necessary conditions for 
duty on its practical side. Grace, so far from destroying nature 
or reason, perfects it, braces and tones it up. 

I. Before touching on these conditions it may be helpful to 
remind you that the matter of duty is human acts, L e,, acts that are 
personal — our very own — and for which we are responsible. Man 
is the only creature on earth, that is a person, which means that 
he is intelligent, self-conscious, self-centered. He alone cay say 
or think / and mine. He is said to possess himself — to be his own 
master. He can call his powers and capacities his own, and acquire 
other things that he calls his property ; have the use of personal and 
possessive pronouns in all languages. Things and animals are not 
persons; they are only chattels. They have no sense of duty, nor 
can they have — except by a figure of speech. They are irrespons- 
ible, and have neither rights nor duties. What we call the rights 
of animals, and our duties toward them, mean that we are bound 
not to abuse the creatures of God, or turn to evil purposes the su- 
preme dominion He gave us over the rest of creation. Cruelty to 
animals does not cease to be a sin on our part because animals are 
not persons and have no rights or claims on us. This cruelty is, on 
our part, a breach of the duty we owe to God, and therefore a sin — 
a gross, unmanly sin of cruelty to a helpless, albeit irrational, 
creature. 

This capacity of possession gives a man personal rights that may 
be either inherited or acquired. Duty is the correlative of right. 
As every man is born into certain personal rights, and acquires 
fresh ones in the way of property or otherwise in the course of 
living, these rights of his impose on everybody else the correspond- 



CONDITIONS OF DUTY 23 

ing duty of respecting them and leaving him in full possession of 
them. As everyone has rights, so has everyone corresponding 
duties. Rights imply duties except in the case of almighty God. 
The great cardinal virtue of justice is the assigning to each one 
his rights and duties. Duty is, therefore, a form of justice — a giving 
each person what is due, what we owe him. Hence we aptly call 
duty a debt that in justice we are bound to pay; and if we don't, we 
are consequently unjust. A man who does his duty all round is 
therefore a just and righteous man — a saint in the full sense of the 
term. But, as in the complex life we now lead, duty is a tangled 
web of obligation, often opposed to passion and self-interest, than 
which nothing is more blinding, we need, as a condition of duty, 
light, and great light. 

We can not, or rather will not, do what is right, unless we see 
it to be right, and without light we can not see, or what, in the mat- 
ter of duty, is the same thing, know. Hence we speak of the light 
of reason or of faith as an essential condition of duty. What it is 
and whence it springs is not our purpose here to determine. All we 
want to impress on you is that without this strange light of knowl- 
edge duty would be impossible, and, indeed, man would not be man. 
Let the world cease to be flooded with light and forthwith life, 
movement, energy cease. Light is the world's soul. So in the 
moral order the soul is bathed in light, making clear to even the 
most degraded human beings the difference between right and 
wrong, good and evil. Through it duty in rude outline at least is 
seen and felt by all. The universal sense of sin that oppresses all 
evil-doers is witness to the universal light or knowledge of duty, 
of which sin is the breach. 

There is no part of the earth's surface that escapes the light. 
The sun shines for long periods even over its poles; and in his 



24 DUTY 

absence other sources of light take his place. In the world of 
duty, likewise, there is ever shining on men's souls the mystic light 
of reason, or faith, that enables every normal person in possession 
of his faculties to say, I see clearly enough that I ought to do what 
is right — i. e., I ought to do my duty. 

We may compare the two great sources of this divinely spiritual 
light to the sun and moon, that in turn rule the sky, day and night. 

The light needful to know what we have to do in the way of 
duty may vary in measure and intensity, but is never altogether 
absent from any healthy mind. As I said, the most degraded 
nations have an idea of duty, calling some actions good, others bad ; 
one character or line of conduct right and straight, another wrong ; 
thus showing the presence of this all-pervading, needful light. 
Though there may be, and are, various degrees of it; yet there is 
not, and never will be, total absence. It is the light ''that enlighteneth 
every man who cometh into this world." The material world, with 
its living freight, would not probably survive the extinction of all 
light for a single day — no more would the moral world the sup- 
pression of light of duty. Ordered life would cease and earth would 
become a pandemonium or a hell. 

II. The next postulate of duty is liberty. An act of duty is 
what is technically called a "human act," i. e., an act for which 
he is responsible, an act that he is free to do or omit, and of which 
freedom, therefore, is a necessary element. Men are never praised 
or blamed for doing what they can not help; but they are for doing 
their duty, or leaving it undone; thus showing that they are free. 
In popular language, we speak of forcing people to do their duty, 
but if force does not mean persuasion then the result is not duty 
at all ; it is no more than mere mechanical movement, the husk and 
matter of duty without the soul. As well speak of forcing a steam 



CONDITIONS OF DUTY 25 

engine to do its duty because we make it move. Duty is necessarily 
free service. Otherwise it is only forced movement. An act done 
under compulsion can not be an act of duty, for the very reason 
that it is not free. Liberty is of the essence of duty. 

Hence beasts have no duties because they are not free agents. 
We force them to work, but to speak of them doing their duty 
except as a metaphor is absurd. Though free in their movements, 
and thus not under compulsion, they are yet irresistibly urged to 
act as they do under the impulse of instincts they can not resist. 
Passion in them is not subject to control as in us. They are its 
slaves, while we are, or ought to be, its masters. We are aware 
of the double element of necessity and freedom within us, certain 
functions of soul and body that go on independently of our will, 
others that we freely determine, and among them all acts of duty. 

God frames and rules His creatures according to their nature, 
rigidly and fixedly in the domain of matter. Without constraint, yet 
necessarily by compelling instinct, in living irrational creatures; 
freely, in conscious, intelligent, self-determining agents. These last 
alone are capable of duty. Many, no doubt, deny us real freedom, 
saying we are only self-adjusting machines, like clocks or watches. 
We sway, or swing, in any particular direction under the irresist- 
ible force of determining motives, and, in truth, are no more free 
than a balance spring or pendulum. But all this is gratuitous 
sophistry that a little reflection soon dissipates. In going through 
acts of duty we feel that we are acting under a full sense of freedom 
and personal responsibility, without which indeed duty were an 
empty sound. Whatsoever the weight of motive, or force, or im- 
pulse, we all realize in the depth of our own consciousness — the facts 
of which are to us, in matters of truth, the last tribunal of appeal — 
we feel, I repeat, that we are quite free to do or leave undone, to 



26 DUTY 

determine on a course of action or refrain even under pressure 6i 
the weightiest motives. We are free in the selection of the motives 
that determine our action. We choose, no doubt, under pressure 
of what we call the strongest motive; but we know very well that 
we are free all the time. Duty, as we understand the term, would 
be inconceivable without liberty. We excuse thieving and killing in 
babies, idiots and the insane, because they are not free, they are 
incapable of crime thereby, like animals; but the liar, the forger, 
and the burglar we condemn because they can avoid, if they choose, 
the gross breaches of duty that label them what they are. 

That man is a free agent, both within and without the sphere of 
duty, ever is and ever will be the unbroken belief of the race. It is 
as deeply imbedded in language, law and custom as gold in the rock. 
No theory of moral necessity has ever held its own in the world of 
thought, or has ever been professed, much less acted on, by its 
adherents, outside their own studies. Like abstract scepticism, de- 
termination is a mere paper theory. 

But men are so merged in matter, their gaze is so fixed on nature 
and her stern, unbending laws that they hardly cast a thought on 
the moral and spiritual world around them, wherein God rules and 
reigns over free subjects by morally binding laws that they ought 
to observe, yet may or may not obscure. This is the great world of 
service faithful and free, i. e., of true and earnest duty. 

In few, if any, treatises on ethics nowadays do we find any men- 
tion of grace as a necessary factor of duty, yet it is the factor. God 
is not alluded to in books of science to-day ; yet if divine action and 
influence in the material universe that science deals with were with- 
drawn for an instant, it would instantaneously perish. He is the 
mainstay of all that is, but more especially in the moral and spiritual 
order. Both "to will and to act" are His, and "without His aid," 



CONDITIONS OF DUTY 27 

i. e., His grace, "we can do nothing." What we ought to do, 
and in duty are bound to do, that with the grace, and only with the 
grace, of God we can do. Even scientifically ethics more than any 
other branch of knowledge has its roots in theology. It finds the 
basis of duty in God seeing the need of order in conduct, and will- 
ing and commanding us to observe it. Duty in the full sense of the 
word — duty, I mean, that does not rest in the mere outward body 
of moral action, but goes down to intention, to motive, the very 
soul of conduct, is the joint effect of grace and free will. No doubt 
we are naturally good; we find within us a love of the ideal, an 
inborn approval of righteousness as opposed to wickedness; still 
we were stricken in the fall. Man is like a wounded bird, made to 
fly, but forced to hop and tumble over the ground. He can no 
longer raise himself above the earth without help from on high. 
Duty is a gigantic task if carried out fully, and overtaxes the powers 
of unaided nature. It is like trying to meet a huge debt with noth- 
ing or next to nothing in the till. Duty with us is not narrowed 
down to mere outward good conduct, or, at best, a fulfilment of the 
claims of natural justice. So far from being distinct from religion, 
it covers the same practical ground as religion. It is whole-souled 
service. It has not dwindled into a branch of human law, but, under 
the guidance of the Church, has expanded into a great tree. It no 
longer deals with the body of conduct, but the soul also. It sur- 
veys the whole field of the heart. 

Three nations have made their mark in history and given shape 
to actual life, the Greek, the Roman and the Jewish. All three had 
lofty notions of duty — but duty based on widely different motives. 
The Roman grounded duty on law and force, the Greek on culture, 
the Jew, or Hebrew, on God. Rome, once strong, just and so far 
dutiful, sank to a mere name. The only idea of duty we inherit 



28 DUTY 

from her is blind, enforced obedience to law. It is cold and lifeless, 
effectual only when backed by material force. To Greece we owe 
an ideal of duty, based on culture, but, alas ! it is an ideal that saved 
neither herself nor her imitators from the most debasing sensuality. 
Refinement and education are but veneer and enamel. They often 
serve but to cloak the base material underneath. Culture trains the 
head, but leaves the heart and will, seat and center of duty, un- 
cleansed. Judea, on the other hand, in and through Christ the 
Messias, has given us the loftiest and noblest idea of duty the 
world ever received— a view of duty that permeates the whole 
moral being — that makes the true liver and doer, that makes all 
men who rise to it pure, upright, transparently truthful to the 
inmost recesses of the heart. Old Rome was masterful, Greece in- 
tellectual, Palestine, or rather the Church, the outcome of Judaism, 
spiritual. 

Christ by the grace He has won for us, the light wherewith He 
has enlightened us, and the liberty of the children of God, which 
He has purchased for us, has put new life into duty, or the moral 
law. He has made its observance possible and feasible. From a 
dead and lifeless theory duty, under His magic touch, has grown 
up into a living force. From a mere department of human law, 
it has become glowing, vital, personal conduct. 

Duty elevated and sanctified by grace is no longer a mere affair 
of correct behavior, a code of rules, written in a book or traced in 
brass and stone, cold, lifeless and motionless — but engraven on the 
the heart, vivified by the spirit of God — it brings us into close per- 
sonal union with the living God, making us His true children. 
"Whosoever are led by the spirit of God they are the sons of God." 

In conclusion, then, hold as a life-long principle that man is bom 
into this world, not to seek selfish ease and pleasure, but to do God's 



CONDITIONS OF DUTY 29 

will, i. e.. His duty. Be assured that there is no genuine peace, 
rest, or contentment away from duty. God put them in duty, and 
who dare or can put them elsewhere? All calculations of worldly 
prudence or personal gain must be laid aside when conscience rings 
out a clear call to duty. It is strange, yet true, that the happiest, 
and at the same time the most trying, moments of life are those 
passed in doing our duty. Ever to strive for what is right, ever to 
dare to be what we ought to be, ever to be bold enough and fearless 
enough to say no when tempted to swerve from duty, this is true 
manliness, because conduct alone worthy of a man. 

Let us beg, therefore, the great Father, whose children we are, 
to give us that light of intelligence, that freedom of will from 
slavery of passion, and, above all, that grace, that divine force, 
needful to do His holy will, in which lies our duty. 



3© DUTY 



IV. LAW, OUTWARD RULE OF DUTY ; AND ITS ADMINISTRATORS 

By what standard are we to regulate our conduct, in other words, 
what is the rule, or norm of duty? Is there any fixed, unerring 
guide of morality, or duty, beyond that furnished by the light of 
reason, common to every man born into this world ? 

It is commonly admitted that there is a twofold rule or standard 
of duty, one external to and independent of ourselves — the moral 
law, law of nature, or law of God; the other internal and personal 
conscience. Of the former of these rules, vis., law, I propose to 
speak to-day. Not that law and conscience are two distinct and 
divergent rules of conduct. Both converge in each act of duty. 
Law is the general rule, and conscience applies it to details, or con- 
crete action. The result is duty. 

Now, what is meant by law? Wherever and whenever we ob- 
serve regularity or fixed order, we at once say there is a rule or 
fixed law at work. Hence, we speak of the laws of nature, the 
laws of thought, and the rest. Indeed, as order and regularity are 
observed in all things, we say the reign of law is universal. God 
is necessarily a God of order, and by one supreme act of will binds 
all creatures to act, according to their requirements and nature. 
What is called the eternal law is supreme order or regularity, in the 
divine Mind, working itself out in creation. Nothing escapes it. It 
embraces rational and irrational creatures, physical, intellectual and 
moral. It is infinitely simple, yet, owing to the narrowness of our 
minds, we break it up into phases, or facets, to which we give 
various names : we say the law of nature, the moral law, the laws 
of thought; and science is the discovery and grouping of the facts 
and rules that make up this order in any given line or branch. 



LAW, OUTWARD RULE OF DUTY 31 

Strictly speaking, there neither is, nor can be, any break or inter- 
ruption of this supreme, eternal law. What we call disorder, or 
violation of law, is but part of a higher order. Miracles, and 
answers to prayers, are phases of supreme law, like the jar pro- 
duced by a change of key, or chords, held in suspension in music, 
they are parts of the great harmony of the universe. Both in its 
physical and moral aspect the natural order of things is interfered 
with and set aside by free will of man, but the will of God ex- 
pressed in supreme order, or law. ever gains its end eventually, 
Man works in time, God in eternity. His purpose is never defeated. 
His law or will never defied in the smallest detail, with impunity. 
If we interfere with the order He has established, we must take the 
consequences, "What a man sows that he will reap," in any and 
every order. 

Now this eternal law of God, recognized as dictating rules of con- 
duct to free, intelligent beings, we call the moral law. Man is a 
free agent, and is ruled in accordance with his nature. The moral 
law binds, but does not compel to a fixed mode of action. Its main 
outlines are traced by way of knowledge on the reason, and acts on 
the will by way of motive. For free creatures there is no such thing 
as blind, determining impulse; there must always be within the 
region covered by liberty more or less deliberation, followed by free 
choice. Hence, light and freedom ever accompany duty or guilt. 
Within the mind and consciousness of all rational creatures God 
has written His law in characters sufficiently clear to enable them 
to guide and regulate their conduct. Men ever had, and still have, 
the light of reason, making known to them all, in dim outline at 
least, their Creator's will — the essential difference between right and 
wrong — the rudiments of duty, in short. All find the alphabet, the 
primary elements, of duty, as it were, traced on reason by an un- 



32 DUTY 

r 

seen hand. Hence St. Paul says, "The Gentiles were inexcusable, 
inasmuch as they had the law, i. e,, the rule of duty, written in their 
hearts, their own conscience bearing testimony to it." Every 
human being all the world over has this law, this sense of right, 
this feeling that justice should be done, more or less developed. 
It is simply the moral law, fixing roughly men's rights and duties; 
rights that are due to others, duties that ought to be done by our- 
selves. Now, this law shining on the reason is the outward, eternal, 
never-changing standard of duty. It is the ideal of justice, with 
which all human laws, customs and regulations of duty have to be 
compared, to test their worth and binding force. Legislators of all 
times have embodied it, wholly or in part, in their codes. Sum- 
maries of its main precepts were committed to writing, as we find 
on Assyrian and Babylonian tablets still extant, previous even to 
its summary and promulgation in the law of Moses. The most per- 
fect epitome of the natural or moral law, however, is that summed 
up in the ten short, pithy, precepts known as the Ten Command- 
ments, or law of God, revealed to Moses. It is the expression in 
substance of what is already contained in right reason, but put in 
such a way as to come home to the multitude and give them a clear, 
short, working law of duty. 

It is by the rule of duty made known to reason that all men, out- 
side the light of revelation, were, and are, judged. But the moral 
law alone avails little for the "healing of the nations" or the ob- 
servance of duty without supernatural light and aid. Look at the 
sad moral history and present state of non-Christian nations, or 
individuals, and masses, that break away from revelation, and you 
will be readily convinced that reason and the moral law are utterly 
insufficient to teach even, and much less to enable, men to live up 
to anything like a high ideal of duty. Apart even from the fall, the 



LAPV, OUTWARD RULE OF DUTY 33 

supernatural would seem a necessary corollary of the natural. And 
so it has ever been. The light of revelation has always supplemented 
that of reason in teaching the race its duty. From its cradle and the 
early dawn of its history we find the race in personal touch, so to 
say, with the Almighty, receiving divine instruction and commands 
over and above those furnished by reason, and handing them down 
traditionally through patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets, till Christ, 
the Messias, came, in whom all nations were to be blessed," Christ, 
the head and founder of the Christian religion, the true light, *'en- 
lightening every man that cometh into this world." 

He was, and is, the final teacher of duty, its Alpha and Omega, 
in whom ethical truth, gradually unveiled in the Old Testament, 
finally culminated ; and, as true God, He has made due provision for 
its preservation and application to the complex, ever-changing moral 
problems of the day without losing any of its fulness, beauty and 
splendor in the one holy, world-wide body, called the Catholic 
Church. She holds up, without fear or favor, the highest, holiest 
and purest standard of duty of any teaching body in the world. 
Even those who dislike her dogma are compelled to admire the 
loftiness, reasonableness and speckless purity of her teaching on 
the vital subject of duty. Surely, then, if conduct determines the 
value of a life here, and hope of a favorable judgment hereafter, 
men are safest in her fold. No recognized school of morals even 
claims to uphold a higher or holier mode of living. By listening 
reverently and attentively to her teaching, we easily learn what our 
duties are in all the various relations of life. The heads of what 
we owe, by way of duty, to God, our neighbor and ourselves, are 
very briefly and clearly set forth in the Catechism put in the hands 
of all her children. Indeed, in what are called the "essentials," 
"what every Catholic is bound to know," vis,, the "Lord's Prayer," 



34 



DUTY 



the Ten Commandments, and the moral dispositions of heart, need- 
ful for worthy reception of her chief Sacraments, even "the lowest 
in the kingdom of God possesses a code and standard of duty im- 
measurably higher than what was known to all the sages and 
moralists of antiquity or their would-be restorers in our own 
day. 

But the fact is, we are not free in the matter. If the moral law 
is supreme, external to our reason, and binding, we must accept 
Him as its interpreter, whom God authorized to extend and expound 
it, and who is to us "the way, the truth, and the light" ; as also the 
system He has framed and left to teach us our duty. Law, to be 
of any practical value, must be administered. Now, where is the 
court, and where are the judges, set up to dispense the law or ethical 
code of Christ in the kingdom of God? We are not pure spirits, 
but flesh and blood, and, therefore, need to learn our duty not from 
angels, but from men, like ourselves, provided only they are duly 
qualified and legally appointed teachers of this highest of all arts. 
God is "supreme reason"; and the service He requires, says St. 
Paul, a reasonable one; sure, then, the society that binds us to- 
gether in discharge of this service or duty, must be formed on a 
rational basis. Now this it would plainly not he if every man were 
a law to himself ; and, as in kingless Israel, "Each man did what was 
right in his own eyes." An external rule, or law, needs external 
application, even in divine things. Hence, the Church is the 
guardian of the moral law, wherein the teaching of the most perfect 
of all moralists is perpetuated, wherein, indeed. He promised to 
abide all days even "to the end of the world." She holds up the 
mirror of duty to reason and well ordered reason beholds therein 
all that is "high and holy and of good repute." 

Do not mind the "can't" that is uttered about her dogmatism. 



LAW, OUTWARD RULE OF DUTY 35 

No doubt, like every other teacher, she talks in the indicative and 
imperative moods rather than the subjunctive, "Tanquam auctorita- 
tem habens" ; but all teaching, to be worth anything, must be dog- 
matic. And are not our ethical judgments, i. e., truth about duty, 
as important as those that deal with the stars. Sound information, 
all the truth that can be had about the great outward rule, or law 
of duty, is as important in our eyes as true knowledge about the 
laws of health or the law of attraction. Many people glibly say, 
"Let us do our duty and leave the clergy to quarrel over the theory 
of it." But what is my duty? What is right and conformable to 
the moral law in the many dark ethical problems of the day? Can 
I commit suicide when useless and tired of life? Can I divorce a 
nagging, perhaps an adulterous wife? Was Onan justified in his 
views and practise of married life ? Can we answer these and other 
perplexing problems of duty without dogmatizing? What more 
reasonable than that there should be a living voice, from whidi 
there is no appeal, to explain and determine the contents both of 
reason and the sacred books regarding the all-important question 
of duty, especially in view of the fact that away from this living 
voice there is a Babel of discordant notes even about its first 
principles. 

On grounds that bear the test of reason, we hold that God has 
supplemented the light of reason with that of revelation, thus un- 
veiling His will in regard to faith and morals, belief and duty. 
Christ's mission in this respect is still carried on by His Church, 
firmly rooted in the world for this very purpose. New phases of 
thought, and life, and conduct, call for new applications and in- 
terpretations of the moral law; and it is her function to set the 
world right in the realm of law and duty. She is their guardian. 
Be on your guard against the cry of morality, or duty, without re- 



36 DUTY 

ligion and dogma. There is no such thing, nor can there be. People 
say Christ led and taught a simple life of duty. His life, they say, 
was a protest against the professional clergy of the day. So far is 
this from being true, His sayings bristle with dogma. He was self- 
assertive and positive, like His Church to-day. The Sermon on the 
Mount, wherein He proposed and enforced His new code of ethics, 
is in reality cemented in dogma. 

By the nature of things, it must be so. All forms of truth, 
whether ethical or otherwise, are necessarily exclusive, i. e., dog- 
matic. A teacher who tells me that it is my duty to be poor in 
spirit, love those that wrong me, and shun worldliness, is just as 
assertive and dogmatic as one who says that there is but one God 
in three persons. Dogma is at the back of duty, as of faith. Right 
thinking about matters of duty must go before doing it. We act on 
our thoughts and views. People, and there is a large school of 
them nowadays who think that individual self-interest and pleas- 
ure should be followed as guides in life rather than reason and con- 
science, make short work of duty in the usual sense of the term. 
They who would divorce duty from doctrine make merry over the 
fact that the good fathers at Nice nearly came to blows over a 
single letter in the wording of a dogmatic decree about Our Lord's 
person. The sneer is as ill-timed as it is vulgar, for those keen- 
witted Greeks saw, as we see to-day, that in the choice of that 
single letter there rested on them the awful responsibility of declar- 
ing whether Jesus Christ was a mere teacher of morals, like Plato 
or Aristotle, with no higher credentials than those of a modern 
professor of ethics; or Christ, the Son of the living God, sent to 
teach us our duty. 

It is to Him, living in His vicar and holding court authoritatively 
in the New Jerusalem, that we appeal in knotty points, bearing on 



LAIV, OUTWARD RULE OF DUTY 37 

the law of God. England was lost to the Church through a question 
of duty decided at Rome against the appeal of a king ; yet all admit 
now that in the point of morals in question the Pope was right, 
and the university professors, lay and clerical, in favor of the king 
were wrong. 

Two great dominating thoughts are absolutely necessary to keep 
mankind from committing intellectual and moral suicide — belief in 
a personal God and the duty of unquestioning obedience to His will 
expressed in law, i. e., the moral law, and all just laws built on it. 
Now it is the Catholic Church that alone of all great social bodies 
witnesses to these two great facts. She holds aloft the banner of 
belief of a free, loving, personal God — our Father in heaven, to 
whom we are bound by the equally personal relations and duties of 
children. No doubt, as we have seen, reason teaches all the out- 
lines of moral duty; but how powerless to persuade and impress. 
We crave and need the contact and force of personal authority. All 
law is remotely at least an expression of the divine Will. 

Now the distinctive characteristic of duty in relation to Christ 
is not so much difference or originality of the matter of the law, 
but in His authority and power as a teacher. "He taught as one 
having authority." Many even of the sublime ideas in the Sermon 
of the Mount are found, perhaps, in works based on reason only; 
but He claimed to impose and authorize them personally, by virtue 
of His character and office. Other moralists could only ex- 
hort and propose; they could not impose, or help their pupils to 
act up to the ideals they dimly saw in reason. They could not even 
personally practise what they taught. The Church, like Christ her 
founder, speaks with no uncertain voice — points to her Lord and the 
crowds of saints, who bravely walked the roughest and high- 
est paths of duty. She tells us to do the same, and if feeble and 



38 DUTY 

unable, then must we draw moral strength to do so "from the 
Saviour's fountains" in grace. 

We have now briefly dealt with the great external rule of duty 
— ^the moral law. All ramifications of duty are but phases of it, 
and they derive all their binding force from agreement with it. 
By it, too, shall we be judged, according to the light, liberty, and 
grace granted to aid us in keeping it. It is put before us in all its 
purity and splendor in Catholic teaching on duty. But remember 
the essence of duty in regard to law is not in knowing, but in doing 
it. Let us learn the law, i. c, the will of God ; but above all, keep it. 
Be it not said of us, as was said of the Athenians, "The Athenians 
know what is right, but the Lacedemonians do it." "Catholics know 
the great law or rule of duty, but outsiders observe it." 



CONSCIENCE: INNER RULE OF DUTY 39 



V. CONSCIENCE : INNER RULE OF DUTY 

Duty is correspondence in conduct with the rules of right and 
wrong. What are these rules? We have seen that they are two- 
fold — the law of God and the law of conscience. We dealt with the 
former in our last discourse. To-day we have to speak of con- 
science, the inner law of duty. The objective and essential morality 
of an action in the abstract springs from its conformity with law, 
the external, fixed, immutable, universal rule of duty. I allude, of 
course, to the moral law, the most perfect summary of which, in its 
main outlines, we find embodied in the Ten Commandments. All 
human laws to be just and binding must be framed in accordance 
with the law of God. All men find the law of duty traced in dim 
outline in reason. This law in its ideal perfection was proclaimed 
by Christ, and is upheld to-day in the Church as the one, perfect, 
external rule of duty. 

But free human acts to be moral and worthy of the name of 
duty must conform with an inner rule, a norm of right and wrong, 
conscience. Law is for the body at large, conscience is for the 
guidance of the individual. It is through conscience that abstract 
law or duty is realized in action. It applies the outer rule of con- 
duct to concrete acts. It is the law, e. g., that slander is a violation 
of duty, "Thou shalt not bear false witness," etc. The words I am 
tempted to utter, rings out my conscience, are slanderous, therefore 
a violation of duty. 

We may appeal for mercy and excuse owing to ignorance, or for- 
getfulness of the law, but no appeal can be lodged once a man acts 
against the plain rule of conscience. He sins and irrevocably. Law 



40 DUTY 

is a map or chart of duty, conscience is a compass. If let alone the 
needle will invariably point true, i. e., to duty. The law is light 
from without, conscience is the eye that receives and applies it 
in vision. Light is ever light; but the visual organs may be dis- 
eased or distorted, still we are bound to use and make the best 
of it, as we have nothing else to see with. The law of God, "pure 
and undefiled," like a ray of clear, bright light, is often broken 
up, and cast back from the mind or eye it falls on. The law is 
made applicable only through conscience. As it is conscience, not 
law, that eventually decides the momentous question of personal 
responsibility, therefore, it decides our moral state, before God. It 
makes or mars a man's life. It renders us good or bad, worthy or 
worthless, godly or godless. It is life's rudder. By following it 
or not we either steer to port or drift hopelessly to moral ruin. That 
it may be a safe inner rule of duty it will be helpful to dwell briefly 
(I) on what is meant by conscience, (II) on the lessons it teaches, 
and (III) indicate a few plain hints for its training and guidance; 
as, like all the other powers of mind and body, it needs schooling. 

As I am not giving a course of lectures on moral science it is 
not my province to determine what conscience is physically or 
metaphysically. We deal with it only as a factor in duty. It may 
be observed, however, that in Catholic schools of thought conscience 
is not deemed a distinct faculty of the soul at all, but simply the 
mind exercising its activity on ethical or moral truth. The mind, 
meaning hereby the group of powers and functions coming under 
the head of intelligence, dealing with the rules and principles of 
duty or good conduct, is called conscience; or, loosely, the moral 
sense. Duty is not a matter of feeling or emotion, or of moral senti- 
ment at all. It is based on the intellectual perception of law, as a 
force binding the conscience, and means conformity in action to 



CONSCIENCE: INNER RULE OF DUTY 41 

the light of external law and inner light of conscience. The prin- 
ciples of morals or duty are as much an affair of mind as those 
of mathematics. "Good ought to be done and evil avoided," is as 
self-evident an ethical or moral truth as "the whole is greater than 
the part" is in general knowledge. From these ethical principles 
we rapidly draw and apply conclusions to the facts of life that 
make up our daily round of duty. Conscience is an inference of an 
implicit, often intricate, act of reasoning in the sphere of morals. 
Thus "all forms of fraud are violations of duty," is a general ethical 
principle or law. The mind goes on to reason, that failing to pay 
just debts, gross misrepresentation as to the quality and price of 
goods, are forms of fraud; therefore, certain acts of mine in my 
business dealings are violations of duty. Conscience is, therefore, 
a necessary concomitant of our intellectual nature. Animals kill, 
steal, give way blindly to passion; but there is no remorse because 
there is no sense of duty. They are neither moral nor immoral. 
They are in a state of innocence. Children, up to a certain age, and 
some backward races up to a certain point, seem incapable of guilt. 
Conscience is dormant in them or undeveloped, like their minds. 
Hence, conscience supposes the possession and use of reason. In 
fact, it is reason, as I said, dealing with moral truth. Its authority 
over conduct is supreme, at least subjectively. It is evidently meant 
to sway and regulate all the complex movements of the heart. It is, 
or ought to be, in the soul of man what the flywheel is to the engine, 
a balance to the watch — it should regulate its escapement, so to say. 
If you think of it, no free action is meant to escape conscience, 
thought, speech, behavior. No other impulse or motive should 
sway it, nor indeed can, without involving the soul in moral dis- 
aster — such as passion, love, self-interest. Though thus supreme, 
inwardly this must not be understood to mean that conscience is 



42 DUTY 

of supreme authority outwardly, or that, as is often fooHshly said, 
there is nothing in the world higher or above conscience. Man 
is not God, nor is he a law to himself. Conscience is of subordinate 
authority — midway between the moral law to which it is bound to 
conform, and our conduct, which must conform to conscience, in 
turn. A man's conscience may be quite wrong. It may give false 
signals. It may be culpably erroneous; if we take no pains to en- 
lighten and correct it. For conscience, after all, is only fallible, 
and no more shielded against error than any other judgment of 
the mind dealing with truth. A man may easily mistake both the 
law and its application to actual facts, yet acted up to in good 
faith it justifies individual conduct and saves us from a breach 
of duty, i. e., from sin. It is the sole light to duty in action. 
Hence, we ever respect a man who we are sure acts conscientiously, 
however strange his conduct may seem. It is to each man the 
herald of the law. It pronounces authoritatively what is right and 
wrong in conduct ; and when we do our best in the way of enlight- 
ening it by the aid of religion and morality, it is to us the voice 
of God. Hence, we esteem a man in proportion to his known con- 
scientiousness. All other qualities yield to this. Conscience is, or 
ought to be, supreme ruler of the soul, for the very reason that it 
voices God. Bear in mind, however, that it is not the function of 
conscience to teach us what is right and wrong. That is the 
office of reason, helped by duly qualified teachers. Conscience only 
applies a law to the actual occurrences of daily life. As soon as 
I am convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the law binds me to do 
something, or leave it undone, conscience at once rightly orders me 
to do or omit it. Conscience, therefore, often saves from sin those 
whom we condemn. Hence, we should never judge another's con- 
science, "To his own Lord he standeth or falleth.'' 



CONSCIENCE: INNER RULE OF DUTY 43 

There are savage tribes who put their parents to death when 
old, out of sense of filial duty. The centurion who carried out the 
sentence of crucifixion and death of Christ acted under a strict 
sense of duty throughout. Murderers are criminals, whilst soldiers 
and hangmen are not, though they kill too. A man may be subjec- 
tively right and objectively wrong, and vice versa. Marcus Au- 
relius, as far as we can judge from history, and Titus also, were 
conscientious rulers; yet they made many martyrs to truth. "Yea 
the hour cometh,'* says Our Lord, "that whosoever killeth you will 
think he doth a service to God" (John xvi, i). 

Strictly speaking, conscience, even in its most perverse state, is 
never wrong. It never commands evil, as such. When we do 
wrong we act against it. Even when drugged and vincibly errone- 
ous, i. e., when we "ought to know better," it ever cries, at least 
feebly, "Do what is right, shun what is wrong." It is the mind that 
is wrong. The Scripture does not say, "Wo to you that obey a 
misguided conscience-" No, but, "Wo to you that call evil good, 
and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness." 
The mind gives wrong names, and so perverts the conscience. The 
conscience was ever good in view. It is always loyal to duty. We 
may drug the mind with false views, we may use all kinds of 
sophisms to elude our plain duty, but conscience ever points to 
what is right, even though it is a wrong thing under a false name. 
Beware of corrupt literature and "new theologies,^' as they lead the 
mind astray and thus mislead the conscience also. There are poems 
and novels with a purpose or a set of views to uphold that would 
degrade the conscience of a band of angels. So true is this that 
in many cases it is almost a moral danger to learn French. But to 
proceed, conscience, to be a safe and sure compass to duty, must 
be certain, i. e., we must be practically sure that what we are doing 



44 DUTY 

is not a breach of duty. There can be no wobbling, no lack of 
straightness in its decisions. We can not act morally under per- 
sistent actual doubt; in other words, whatever the law may be, 
we must make up our minds in some way or other that we are 
safe in acting as we do, i, e., with or against it. A soldier, e, g,, 
may doubt whether war at all is right, he may even be certain, as 
snany in some wars were, that it is unjust; yet he may conscien- 
tiously fight ; because, though wrong or doubtful in the abstract, yet 
he, as a soldier, must obey. If we can not settle our doubts or 
perplexities we must stop acting altogether; or, if action is neces- 
sary, choose the safer and more probable side, or the lesser of two 
evils. In matters where conscience is concerned what we do must 
at least be morally permissible. 

II. We have next to examine what this mysterious voice of con- 
science within us that seems ever to say, "You ought to do right, 
you ought not to do wrong,'' teaches. As an inflexible inner rule of 
duty it bears witness to an ever present, overruling lawgiver, from 
whom the binding force of duty proceeds. Even science has come 
slowly round to proclaim the ''immanence" of God in His creatures. 
The word is not objectionable, if it means that He is distinct from 
and above them ; but duty and conscience declare His presence quite 
as forcibly, more so, indeed. No two thoughts disturb the peace 
of sinful men more than those of an ever present God and an ever 
intruding conscience. What systems have not been devised to ex- 
plain away, and get rid of both ; but in vain ! As Our Lord fore- 
told, the holy spirit of God in and through the voice of conscience 
is ever "convincing the world of sin." Were these two concepts 
mere creations of fancy — shadows of self — we should have banished 
them long ago. Great thinkers were not and are not wanting to 
help weaker brethren in the process; but no! The law that con- 



CONSCIENCE: INNER RULE OF DUTY 45 

science calls us to observe is not of our making, or of that of our 
fellowmen. We suffer no remorse in eluding an act of Congress or 
the by-laws of a village council. We judge their worth and justice 
and force by comparison with a supreme law above ourselves — the 
moral law ; and the Supreme Being who framed it, Almighty God. 
We say that conscience is our judge; but we mean God judging 
in us. We feel that we are being daily weighed, sifted, tried by one 
not ourselves. We may elude a carping monitor, we may escape the 
arm of justice, we may kill an aching nerve ; but the worm of con- 
science we can never utterly destroy. Passion, pleasure, gain may 
drown its voice for a time, but it soon gets heard again above 
the world's din. It stands the most hardened hearts — even those 
of the Pharaos, the Herods and the Neros, past, present and to 
come. It is God's holy spirit doing His wish in the human heart. 

Again, conscience bears witness to the paramount supremacy of 
duty. It teaches us the lesson of the need of submission to its 
own authority. Even in spite of ourselves — against all the passions 
of the heart combined in common league against it — it persists in 
affirming that duty is supreme; that its fulfillment, even if it did 
not lead to happiness in this life, which it mostly does, and assuredly 
will in the next, is the main purpose of life ; and that its transgres- 
sion by sin is the deepest wrong we can inflict on our own souls. 
Conscience will not tolerate a rival. It will never leave us at 
peace till we reckon its authority as supreme in the soul. Now, it 
has but one theme — a theme it never varies — viz., do your duty. It 
excuses everything else almost. It never stings, pains or wounds, 
except when we commit a breach of duty bending under sin. A 
man may break all the rules of grammar. He may trample on 
the whole code of etiquette, he may offend against every canon 
of good taste and refinement, he may be a boor, a bounder and a 



46 DUTY 

Philistine, and know it and feel it too ; and yet he will never suffer 
a single pang of conscience ; but let him slander or defraud, or turn 
sensual, and his conscience will be up in arms against him at once. 
Hence Our Lord's warning to "make peace with our enemy on the 
way," i. e., with our own conscience by repentance. Conscience 
has but one command — one lesson — one counsel, duty; one enemy, 
sin. 

True, it may for a time be deadened with spiritual morphine and 
chloroform so deftly furnished by some moral specialist in soul 
diseases to-day; but it is sure to wake up, and gnaw, and torment 
as before. It can not be extracted, or cut off, like an aching tooth 
or diseased limb, for it is God asserting His rights to supreme sway, 
even over our free will. 

HI. The higher and better self, in contradistinction to the lower 
and animal self, is simply the soul living up to conscience. We 
live our best in living conscientiously. 

But, like every other God-given faculty, the conscience needs 
training. All the powers of the soul coalesce in an act of duty, 
intellect, memory and will; so that conscience, the inner rule and 
measure of duty, loosely speaking, is a combination of them all. 
Now, look at what training does for the mind. Compare a stupid 
savage with a modern professor; yet both are dowered with the 
same essential mental powers ; education makes the difference. To 
master the lowliest art or trade one must train hand and eye. All 
success in life is due to the special training of some one faculty 
or other with which we are endowed. Training is use. Though 
conscience, more than any other power of the soul, is divine, yet it, 
too, is subject to the general law of development and growth — in 
other words, it must be trained — it must be educated. We meet 
people who seem to have lost all conscience — who appear to see no 



CONSCIENCE: INNER RULE OF DUTY 47 

perceptible difference between right and wrong — who, in short, have 
no sense of duty. If there is any conscience left it is rudimentary — 
a mere stump, like a limb withered away through lack of use. Grace, 
no doubt, is necessary to duty; but grace must find something on 
which to fasten, i. e., a trained conscience. And just as we see a 
vast difference between the skilled and the unskilled, the ignorant 
and the highly intellectual, so is it in the field of conscience. In 
fact, there are individuals, classes, nations in whom it seems dor- 
mant or lost. And yet, even in its natural state, it is man's highest 
endowment, and the very cement of the social fabric. No con- 
science, no duty; and without duty society must, sooner or later, 
collapse. 

The body in its every nerve and muscle, to be fit and alert, calls 
for air, light and exercise. So does the conscience, morally. It 
needs light and saving grace from above and daily, nay, hourly 
practise from within. It is unjust to our conscience to let it grow 
wild and untilled, just as it is to let a child grow up without 
training. 

What conscience needs most, in the way of gtiidance, is a knowl- 
edge, deep and extended, of God's holy law — the will of God — the 
eternal never changing standard of right and wrong. Hence, the 
value of daily religious instruction in and out of school. Knowl- 
edge of duty, it is true, is no guarantee of its observance; but 
ignorance for certain entails its neglect. An enlightened Catholic 
conscience is the loftiest index of moral truth and duty. There 
no false weights or measures are to be seen, say what her enemies 
may. And why? Because they are duly stamped and measured 
in accordance with "the pattern on the mount," the truth as it is in 
Jesus, X. e., in God. We set our time pieces with the sun. There- 
fore, keep your conscience straight and trustworthy by making 



48 DUTY 

them echo the great external rule of duty, the law of God. In her 
authorized catechisms and manuals of instruction you have the safe 
and guaranteed standard of the supreme law. 

From earliest childhood we should be trained, as indeed most 
Catholic children are, to listen to and follow this inner law of duty. 
It is the bell of God's law. It is the clock that tells us the hour 
when duty is to be fulfilled. If honestly acted up to conscience is 
God's call to us. Its decisions, even when erroneous, are not to be 
resisted without disaster to the soul. By it we stand or fall before 
God. 

In our formulas for night prayer there is usually a pause inserted 
for the examination of conscience: it is a necessary preliminary, 
moreover, for a good confession. Now, all this indicates a daily 
searching of heart as one of the best means of keeping the con- 
science bright and lustrous. The daily practise of it at stated times 
and by regular methods is the secret of the wondrous delicacy of 
conscience that characterizes those high schools of refined and cul- 
tured piety — convents and monasteries. Hearing is lost by stopping 
the ears to sound, the sight by closing the eyes or shutting out the 
light; and so conscience by closing the eye and ear of the soul to 
God's holy law. Daily examen means practise and training of our 
highest faculty, that of apprehending right and wrong. Yet, like 
any other power, it may by disuse become warped, scared and 
deadened. This evil we shall avoid by ever keeping our conscience 
tuned and strung in unison with God's law, witnessed to and ex- 
pounded by the Church. 



ITS SANCTION 



49 



VI. ITS SANCTION 

Introduction. — In our previous discourse we dealt with conscience 
as the inner and secondary rule of duty, as law is its primary and 
outward. To-day we propose to speak of the rewards and punish- 
ments attached to the observance or infraction of duty. Every 
breach of the law of conduct, in the sense in which we use it here, 
every violation of conscience, is a sin, because a known transgression 
of the moral law. This makes it an offense against God, for the 
reason that the moral law is the expression of His will. To run 
wilfully counter to this law of God, and its just derivatives, is, 
therefore, to oppose His will, in which the essence of sin rests. 
There is a tendency to-day to separate morality from its author, 
and make of law a sort of idol, or fetish, quite independent of a 
divine Being, whose will it voices. Now we can not too strongly 
insist on the truth — which really gives to duty its sanction that 
law is always the expression of some will determining some sort of 
order to be kept. If we fall in with this order we get rewarded ; if 
we oppose it we get punished. Even the laws of nature — the reg- 
ular course, the constant sequence of cause and effect, that we 
observe in the material world, are not independent forces or entities 
in themselves; but the supreme Mind, arranging all things, and 
the supreme Will carrying them out. The sanction accompanying 
law is measured by the will and power of its framer. We have a 
faint image of will as the fount of law, duty, obedience and sanc- 
tion, in our own wills, impressing their commands on the various 
muscles of the body and in directing the conduct of others. The 



50 DUTY 

will of man within certain limits, and acting with the laws of 
nature, effects marvels in this world. We see what one powerful 
will can do in the way of law or influence on others, in such in- 
stances as those of a Caesar, a Napoleon or a Bismarck. But the 
divine Will is infinite and supreme. All order is subject to it; and 
all beings are carrying out this supreme order, either consciously 
or unconsciously, willing or unwillingly. If we do not choose to 
comply with this order in one line or direction, we must do so in 
another. Even chaos, moral or physical, has its laws, from which 
divine order will duly come. The permission of what we call evil 
does not mean that God lets go the reins. He remains as supreme 
and absolute a master as ever. His will, though not always done 
in one way, yet must be done in the end. The all pervading law 
we see reigning in and around us is but another word for God's 
will in action. Many see only blind forces obeying blind law in the 
world; but surely behind this "reign of law" visible either in 
chemical affinity, the march of planets or the wonders of life, any- 
one "with eyes to see and ears to hear" can clearly observe infinite 
mind and infinite will — in other words, God acting through fixed 
law. 

But in dealing with duty we deal with moral, not physical, law. 
One striking peculiarity of the order reigning in the world of 
matter is that we can conceive the laws making up this order re- 
versed without any inherent difficulty or absurdity. The relation 
they give rise to are contingent. If the law of attraction ceased or 
acted in another way, if tlie sun rose in the west and set in the east, 
if fire ceased to bum or water to flow, there would be no inherent 
eontradiction in the change. No necessary truths or relations 
spring from these laws. But it is different with the moral. I 
could not possibly conceive a good and just God approving a lie, 



ITS SANCTION 51 

condoning injustice, or looking with equal indifference on virtue and 
vice. By the very nature of His being He must love and wish 
what is right and good and loathe what is wrong and vile. It is 
the foundation of ethics that a moral person or will loves good and 
hates evil. Every will is drawn to and motived by good, either real 
or apparent. There are certain truths founded on essential rela- 
tions, such as those of number two plus two equals four, or "the 
whole is greater than its part/' the opposite of which is unthinkable, 
because involving a contradiction; so in ethics, or moral science, 
there are certain necessary moral relations giving rise to certain 
necessary moral truths. That theft or ingratitude, or neglect of and 
cruelty to children, should be virtuous, and not vicious, we deem 
absurd and morally contradictory. That duty should not bind, or 
that God should be indifferent to its neglect or observance, is 
morally unthinkable. 

And this brings us to the main subject of our discourse, the 
sanction of duty. We may elude or evade a physical law without 
any consciousness of doing wrong. We are morally free to make 
water flow up hill or hinder the course of nature in its physical 
aspect. And yet, if we thwart or infringe the laws of nature, we 
get punished for our mistakes. If we breathe bad air, take bad 
food, wear unseasonable garments, the result is disastrous. Good 
health is the reward of keeping the laws of nature; bad health, or 
even death, avenges their infringement. The result, call it punish- 
ment, if you will, of transgressing physical laws may be separated 
by a long interval from its cause. We sow groundsel or thistles; 
it may be in error, but we pay for our mistake when the harvest 
comes round. 

The same holds in moral law, only with much more disastrous re- 
sults. We fail in duty — ^we sin, and we feel conscious of guilt. A 



52 DUTY 

mere error is often followed by great, deep and long suffering. 
Witness the effects of disregarding the laws of health; yet sin, or 
failure in duty, seems to escape. But it is only apparent, the pun- 
ishment of transgressing a law, from which even God could not 
dispense, if not swift, is sure. 

It is true we should fulfil the moral law out of a sense of duty, 
for its own sake; out of love, in fact, and not through any selfish 
motive of fear of punishment or hope of reward. But granting all 
this, sanction, i.e., reward or punishment, is an inherent part of law. 
Duty, according as it is observed or neglected, necessarily entails 
one or other. The g^eat driving force impelling to duty should cer- 
tainly be love ; but taking men in the mass, they can not even be 
ruled, much less made dutiful, in full sense of the term, without 
whip and spur. And, after all, even the semblance of duty in forced 
observance of law is better than anarchy. 

Apart from this, rewards and punishments enter into the nature 
of law. If people did not benefit, i. e., if they were not rewarded, 
by law, laws would not be made. No law-giver is, or possibly can 
be, indifferent to the observance of the laws he enacts. Indeed a 
code of laws often reads like a list of punishments following their 
violation. Now, if this is so in merely civic affairs, touching only 
the surface of life, how much more in duty, cutting down to the 
division of soul and spirit — made up, in great part, of necessary 
laws from which even God himself can not dispense. Punishment 
is, therefore, the necessary consequence of the violation of duty. 
It is part of justice, the reverse of the medal. It is like a sequence 
in logic or physics. If I owe one man fifteen dollars and another 
five, I am necessarily in debt to the amount of twenty dollars. If 
a man casts himself down from a high tower on the stones, he must 
inevitably fall and kill himself; as easily escape these issues as the 



ITS SANCTION 



53 



punishment inherent in the infringement of duty. Moral law thus 
broken can no more be flouted with impunity than any other. It is 
but a branch of eternal order that must hold sway in spite of all 
resistance. Impressed on dead or irrational creatures, it bears down 
irresistibly; impressed on free, rational beings, like men, it may be 
resisted and violated by sin ; but the debt thereby incurred must be 
paid down to the last farthing. There is no outlet. The guilty 
must restore the balance of divine order he dared to disturb, or 
suffer, till someone restores it for him. By strict law a shadow is 
."cast if we stand in the light, so in morals or the realm of duty. 
Who shall remove the shadow cast by a sinful world on the divine 
sun-dial? It needed the incarnation and atonement of a God. 

And yet most people flatter themselves that they can escape the 
violation of duty with impunity. Each singly thinks himself 
secure — the spoilt child of an avenging God. He will and must 
punish others, we know and admit, in due course; but there will 
always be a loophole of escape for us. But God can not com- 
promise. He can not condone sin. Even if forgiven through Christ, 
it has a certain sanction left in punishment. God could make a man 
imponderable, He could make fire stay its devastating march. He 
could suspend the law of gravitation; but He could not sanction a 
lie or condone illicit love. To any moral being, least of all the 
Supreme, this would be impossible. 

One main reason, now that faith in a future life, to be determined 
by one's conduct in this, is growing dim, of the widespread dis- 
regard of moral duties, except externally, is that we are so accus- 
tomed to see effect follow cause immediately in nature, and not 
observing punishment follow sin, we rush to the conclusion either 
that there is no sanction at all attached to duty, or that if its secret 
violation is punished we may minimize, if not escape it altogether. 



54 DUTY 

We see very well that if, unable to swim, we leap into the ocean 
we drown; if we fall into the fire we burn; if we take poison we 
die; but it is not apparently so in morals. Men often steal, lie, 
calumniate, kill even, hate, and the rest, without any harm, nay, 
often with great pecuniary gain, and they are tempted to think all 
danger of punishment is over. "I have sinned and what evil hath 
befallen me?" is an expression as much in vogue among sinners 
to-day as in David's time. But it is not true even in this life that 
effect immediately follows cause. Early death or long drawn out 
diseases are often separated by long intervals from the errors or 
sins of youth that gave rise to them. Ignorance, poverty and ill- 
success in life are often the result of idleness at school. Sowing 
and reaping are parted by long intervals of time. An acorn is 
dropped into the ground — is forgotten, or utterly lost to view ; and 
yet after many years a noble oak tree, with its yearly crop, is the 
reward of our slight labor in planting. We are reaping to-day the 
harvest of good or evil planted by our forefathers thousands of 
years ago. In morals or in nature the harvest is far from being 
contemporary with the sowing. What we know for certain is that 
in both, "What a man sows that he will reap," and that usually 
each grain sown is reaped a hundredfold, whether the seed be 
wheat, grapes or thistles. 

It may be objected that "duty, like virtue" is its own reward, and 
infraction of it its own punishment. The trend of opinion is 
against belief in any sanction for duty beyond this ; and, moreover, 
that all punishment, to be just, must be meant for correction and 
not for vengeance J which is immoral ; hence the mildness of prison 
discipline and the growing repugnance to the penalty of death. No 
doubt a great deal of barbarism existed formerly, and in some places 
still lingers in the methods of administering justice — ^but it still 



ITS SANCTION 



55 



remains just that the violation of duty should and must be punished. 
Mere vengeance, implying unjust anger and rage and brutal treat- 
ment, is imperfect; but the punishment of wrongdoing merely as 
such is sound and right. To wreak vengeance for private wrongs, 
to exceed the just measure of chastisement, may be denounced, but 
not otherwise. Apart from all idea of correction, example or de- 
terrent force, sin rightly brings punishment in its train. Who will 
say that the brute who outrages and murders an innocent child, 
or the man who be'trays his country to the enemy, should not be 
punished apart altogether from any thought of correction. And 
yet such punishment expresses the cry of vengeance, or indignation, 
if you will, on the part of society against the wrongdoer. We 
neither blame nor punish an animal, or madman, because there is, 
nor can there be, any violation of duty; but we punish a criminal. 
For crime or sin, or any dereHction of duty whatsoever, is no mere 
bodily disease : It is a human act — the free, deliberate choice of a 
depraved will ; and as such ought to be, and eventually is, punished. 
Blame and punishment are as much deserved results of free action 
as praise and reward. The contrary is the mere cant of deter- 
minism, a mere euphemism for fatalism. "Punishment," says Hegel, 
"is the other half of sin." "If a man," says St. Anselm, "chooses to 
evade the will (i, e., law, one's duty) of God commanding, he falls 
under the same will punishing.^' The high capacity for duty involves 
also the low capacity of sin — a terrible responsibility, which no free 
creature in the present order can escape. 

II. Now there is a double sanction attached to duty — imperfect 
in this life, perfect in the next. Though the reward of duty here 
and now is only imperfect, still it is very real, tangible and visible. 
In fact, duty even in this world more than pays its way. Though 
duty binds against all risks and consequences, even death itself, yet 



56 DUTY 

in most, I may say, all cases, it meets with heaven's sanction in its 
results here below. So true is this that the utilitarians themselves 
confound the pleasure and other temporal advantages of duty with 
duty itself, whereas it is by its very nature opposed both to pleas- 
ure and utility. If these are its sole motives and foundations, it 
ceases to be duty, as we have already said. They are only conse- 
quences. First of all, broadly speaking, the fulfilment of duty per- 
fects self. It roots, strengthens and develops what is best in us — 
will, reason and conscience; and, therefore, produces that inward 
essential peace and happiness for which we were made. A man 
who habitually shirks duty is at war with self in its higher aspect. 
To violate known duty is to act against conscience, and such a 
man can never be truly happy within, whatever his outward circum- 
stances may be. And no matter what the outward results of dutiful 
conduct are, the inward self-satisfaction and contentment more than 
make up for any loss, trial or misfortune that may fall upon us in 
being true to duty. 

On the other hand the violation of duty is its own avenger, the 
feeling that we are not living, I do not say, up to our Christian 
standard, but even up to our common nature. Man is man not 
through his animal nature, but his rational — ^his intelligence, will 
and conscience. Hence the neglect of duty usually produces either 
feverish restlessness or intense and settled melancholy. Even from 
a purely natural point of view, the conscious infringement of duty 
must wear away eventually every shred of self-respect, and with 
that everything goes. Cleverness, wit, genius, wealth and health 
may be left, but the soul that animates and gives value to them 
has fled. There is nothing left to enkindle, and keep alive anything 
like sustained effort and self-sacrifice; and what is man without 
them? "A mere reed shaken by the wind." 



ITS SANCTION 



57 



Then, again, duty, though not necessarily, nor in all cases, con- 
duces to health of body and competence, if hot wealth. Putting 
aside the supernatural altogether, duty limited even to the exercise 
of the four cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, temperance and forti- 
tude, tends, and in the nature of things must tend, to make both 
men and nations "healthy, wealthy and wise," so to say. The 
practise of the three common duties of truthfulness, honesty and 
sobriety is the best insurance one can make for '*peace and plenty" 
in one's old age. The honest and truthful servant, the sober and 
industrious workman, the upright tradesman, lawyer, doctor and 
clergyman have ninety-nine chances to one in their favor of suc- 
ceeding well in life against those who lack these qualities — who, in 
short, neglect their common duties in life. 

But apart altogether from mere worldly success, duty ever wins 
influence, respect and esteem. It is no rare thing to find people 
without any aid, arising from name, wealth or talent, commanding 
the lifelong confidence of their fellowmen, raised almost against 
their will to positions of trust and power, their sole recommendation 
being that they are men of duty. It is the old story, personality 
means character, and character, good or bad, is determined by the 
way in which a man does his duty. Where duty decays, all worth 
goes, too. What we call a good, sound, public spirit, the very life 
and soul of a nation, depends entirely on the way in which citizens 
discharge their duty. Character is built on duty. In proportion to 
the way they fulfil or neglect their moral duties, the character that 
people form is worthy or worthless. And, after all, the main asset 
of a nation is the character of its people. Art, wealth, learning, all 
that goes popularly to make up civilization, soon get swept away 
if there is not a strong dutiful race to guard them. People forget, 
too, that the greatness and happiness of a people depend entirely 



58 DUTY 

on their moral character, i. e., on their doing their duty. Existing 
material prosperity may be the reward of past, not the substance or 
even proof of actual duty. Worthless nations, like worthless indi- 
viduals, may inherit and waste the inheritance, material, moral, or 
intellectual, of dutiful ancestors. Duty to be rewarded, even imper- 
fectly in this life, must be personal. The reward is mainly interior 
in the peace and content that accompanies a life of duty. 

But when all is said and done, duty never finds nor can find its 
full, adequate sanction in this life. All we can say is that in most 
cases its observance brings more decided temporal advantages to 
mind and body than its violation. But how very few would even 
attempt to face the difficulties of a dutiful life, in all its integrity, 
if there were no beyond ? If all ends at the grave then the only wise 
man is the sensualist. Duty, if death ends all, would be supreme 
folly ; pleasure, the height of wisdom. All men are naturally drawn 
to pleasure, in fact they hunger and thirst for it; whereas duty is 
cold, hard, and, considering the force of animal passion, repulsive. 
Individuals would never think of the common good or weigh the 
prospective advantages of the observance of duty over the actual 
pleasure of its violation. If all is over at death, they would think, 
and rightly think, only of themselves, i. e., of their own butterfly 
pleasures during the short summer day of a brief life. I speak now 
of duty in the full extent of the term, duty based on high, worthy 
motive and covering the whole field of rectitude in thought, speech 
and action. Now duty in this sense never receives full recognition 
or reward in this life, nor its opposite due blame and punishment. 
Duty is, as I said, often taken in a narrow, limited sense to mean the 
conduct that goes to form a good soldier, a good citizen, a good 
husband, or the rest — a sense quite compatible with the grossest 
moral delinquencies in all branches of duty save one. Now the 



ITS SANCTION 



59 



highest types of perfect duty which our race has produced have 
all been men and women that suffered most in this world — the 
saints and martyrs. All men were made for happiness, and seek 
it, either by the paths of duty or pleasure, yet in the full perfect 
sense it eludes all. None reach it, but least of all those who deserve 
it most by their self-sacrificing lives of duty. The others have, at 
least, the fleeting joys and pleasures of a sinful life. If duty found 
its full sanction here, its full measure of reward or punishment, then 
the higher life, the life of reason, will and conscience, would be 
irrational. No! God often detaches pleasures, happiness, content- 
ment from the practise of the loftiest duty, but only for a time. 
Justice and equity so marked in the other realms of God's kingdom 
will resume their natural course and duty meet with the reward it 
merits, and vice that escapes punishment here its due measure of 
retribution hereafter. Should Christ suffer poverty, insult, torture 
and death, while a Nero or a Caligula revel in delights? No! rest 
assured that God's rule is not one of anarchy and injustice. "What 
a man sows that he will reap" either in his land or his conduct. 
Every law that God has framed, whether in the material or moral 
order, will, in due time, work out his divine Will and bring us 
sanction. His moral law, if observed, brings its reward partly 
and imperfectly here; fully and completely hereafter. Heaven is 
the only rational answer to the suffering and obloquy of the just; 
as hell is to the success, pleasures and carnal joys of the wicked. 

Remember that heaven is high and reached only by the steep, 
hard, thorny road of Christian duty; hell is low and easily reached 
by the broad, flowery path of pleasure. Choose, now that oppor- 
tunity is offered. Work, i. e., do your duty, while you have the 
day of life, for the night of death is fast approaching, when no 
man can work. 



6o DUTY 



VII. OUR DUTIES TO GOD 

We have hitherto dealt with the subject of duty, in theory, we 
now come to deal with it in practice. Abstract duty is a mere empty 
word, unless it becomes concrete, in action. And yet what more 
common than to know what is right, and do what is wrong. To 
make duty vital — to reach the end for which God made us moral, 
i. e., beings capable of duty, it must live in head, heart and hand; 
in other words, we must know, love, and do our duty. 

As was observed, duty is a debt, due by us to others ; it is what we 
owe to Almighty God by the moral law, which includes likewise 
what we morally owe to ourselves and other men. Now it is self- 
evident that our first and main duty is to discharge our debt to 
God by what is called worship or religion. Duty is a form of rela- 
tions. As soon as mutual relations begin duties emerge and con- 
tinue as long as these relations last. When people marry, or be- 
come parents, or enter any new state of life, they find a new set 
of duties awaiting them. If death or separation intervenes they 
cease, or change into others. But there is one relation that never 
changes — one stringent tie can never be broken, and that is the 
relation between the Creator and the creature — ^between God and 
ourselves. We are absolutely dependent on Him, body and soul; 
and His rights to our worship and service are unquestionable and 
unqualified. 

Our discourse, therefore, to-day will turn on our duties to Al- 
mighty God. They hold the first rank in importance, inasmuch as 
they spring from the ineffably close relations that bind man to the 
Being who made him. God's right to the worship of His creatures 



OUR DUTIES TO GOD 6i 

is self-evident. Only one whose mental vision is extinct, or dis- 
torted, would think of questioning it. Hence, wherever there is 
an idea of duty at all, that is, among all sane, rational beings, there 
religion of some sort or other exists; and has ever been to the 
front in their history. Indeed, religion plays, ever has played 
and ever will play, the most important part in human life. I say 
human life because the lower animals are incapable of rising to 
the idea of duty at all. Religion is a distinctive badge of man ; 
and so far from irreligion making an advance in civilization 
it is but decay, a reversion to the beast. Religion, right or wrong, 
true or false, is worthily deemed the main need of the heart, as it is 
our first duty. To be in harmony with the infinite power, force, 
love, God in short, that meets us at every turn in life, must strike 
any thinking man as a matter of supreme importance. There are 
no doubt isolated cases of atheism, as of insanity, but no large con- 
nected groups of atheists. The most degraded savages have re- 
ligious rites, showing their sense of the duty of worship. The 
recognition of a superhuman power, or powers, and the duty of ex- 
pressing dependence thereon by some outward signs or ceremonies, 
is an essential mark of all beings raised above the order of the 
brutes. Atheism or irreligion, if sincere, is a disease, or rather a 
crime. The fact that there are endless forms of religion is no argu- 
ment against the evident need and duty of some form of it. We do 
not speak here of revealed, but of natural religion — religion made 
known by the light of reason, and involving the duty of worship. 
All men, with few exceptions, have admitted this. Indeed any form 
of religion, however grotesque, is better than none. Diversity and 
abuse of religious rites is only an argument in favor of a revelation 
clearer and more emphatic than that given in reason alone. All, 
indeed, who live up to the higher self in conscience must see and 



62 DUTY 

feel the duty of loving, respecting and adoring the author of their 
being — of offering, in short, the tribute of prayer and praise, and 
other forms of worship summed up in the word religion according 
as their lights dictate. 

Can any human being in whom reason and a sense of duty still 
linger look up to the starry skies, or around him, on sea and land, 
without recognizing a God, and feeling both the need and duty of 
adoring Him as the Lord and Master of all ? 

As I am addressing Catholics I understand by duties to God not 
only those imposed by natural, but also by supernatural, or revealed 
religion. Indeed, the two sets of duties merge and intermingle. 
Revelation perfects and completes what reason begins. They stand 
in the relation of moonlight and sunlight. These duties are for us 
summarized in the first three commandments of God, as explained 
authoritatively by the Church. As mentioned in a previous dis- 
course the Ten Commandments, or law of God, first traced on rea- 
son — written on the tablets of the heart ere being transferred to 
tablets of stone on Sinai form the universal code of duty for all 
mankind. God confirmed His natural revelation of the law of con- 
duct by a supernatural one to Moses. Though under different 
formulae, the sense of duty implied in the law of Moses, solemnly 
re-enacted and imposed by Christ, is now the "law of nations." No 
code of law, or duty, is deemed just, even in non-Christian countries, 
that does not conform to the Ten Commandments. 

The first three, as observed above, applied by the Church to suit 
the altered conditions of times, places and persons, form a sum- 
mary of our duties to Almighty God. There were, and are, many 
odd standards of duty to God afloat in the world, yet there is but 
one true ideal standard — that delivered by Himself in the Ten Com- 
mandments. 



OUR DUTIES TO GOD 63 

There have been, and are, many strange forms of religion in 
the world to teach and enforce that duty ; but there has never been 
more than one true, the religion of Israel in the old, and of Christ 
in the new, dispensation; just as there are, and have been, many 
strange Gods and grotesque ideas about God; but only one true — 
the God of Israel and Our God. Though many say of the "King- 
dom of God," as of Christ, "Lo, it is here, and, lo, it is there ; yet 
is there but one visible kingdom, that founded by Christ and built 
on Peter, the rock." Now it is in this house of God that man 
learns in all their fulness what his duties to God are. Say not, as 
so many do, that this is narrowing the kingdom of God within the 
limits of the Roman Church. She is the only one that ever claims 
universal or world-wide dominion. Apart from this, before Christ's 
coming, the tangible and visible kingdom of God on earth had 
shrunk to the isolated hill country of Judea, and the one legal form 
of ritual and sacrifice was narrowed to the rocky summits of Jeru- 
salem. Whereas to-day "the clean oblation mounts to God from the 
rising to the setting sun." Now, as then, there are many "true 
Israelites" and "children of Abraham" not "far from the kingdom." 
Though bodily, not of it, yet belonging to it in spirit, and praying 
for the coming of His kingdom, already established in their souls, 
they are led and guided by His spirit ; and we know that "whosoever 
are led by the spirit of God they are the sons of God." 

We now come to specify in detail the duties that we "of the king- 
dom" owe to Almighty God. These duties summed up in the word 
"worship" fall under two headings — internal and external. 

The duty of internal worship, or worship of the heart, as it is 
called in Scripture, arises from the fact that man is chiefly man by 
virtue of his spiritual soul, and its internal powers, intelligence and 
free will. It is only by our understanding that we can know God 



64 DUTY 

at all ; and only through our will that we can love Him. Now it is 
our first duty to use these noble faculties in silent adoration and 
homage. The source of all true worship is interior ; and there must 
be some measure of it behind all outward words, forms, rites and 
ceremonies, if we would not have it sink into empty and soulless 
formalism, like that of the Jews, of whom Our Lord said, ^'This 
people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." 
For us the internal duties of religion are summed up in the worship 
of the one true living God, by the divine virtues of Faith, Hope 
and Charity, in their subjective or inward aspect. It is our duty to 
use our minds in learning all we can about God, through reason and 
revelation, the approved sources of faith or belief, and furnished 
with this knowledge, using our will and affections in acts of hope, 
or truthfulness and charity, or love. No higher form of inward 
worship than to believe, hope and love God, especially when ex- 
pressed in the shape of inward effective prayer. This is true union 
with God, and anyone who sincerely and in his own way thus 
worships God, is sure eventually to reach His kingdom, either here 
or "to come." 

But our duties to God do not begin and end with silent, solitary 
worship. We are not pure spirits, but creatures of flesh and blood. 
Our bodies are as much the gift of God, and part of ourselves, as 
our souls, and, therefore, they, too, must take a share in divine 
worship. Moreover it is natural, not to say obligatory and neces- 
sary, to give vent to inward feelings, by outward acts. Thought 
and its outward symbol, as we see in the deaf and dumb, are 
so closely related and dependent that one needs the support of 
the other. The Church, therefore, echoes nature and voices 
God's will in requiring the body to unite with the soul in prais- 
ing God. The body is one of the marvels of material creation, 



OUR DUTIES TO GOD 65 

and vivified by a living soul is called the temple of the Holy Ghost. 
Man sums up the universe he represents, is the high priest, in fact, 
of this visible world. In the Scripture, sun, moon, stars, seas, moun- 
tains and rivers are called upon, and unconsciously, in displaying the 
glory and attributes of God respond to the call to praise and bless 
God and shall not the whole man — body and soul — take part in the 
hcnage of creation to its Maker ! We are by nature fond of cere- 
mony, display and splendor. Every social function, nay, every 
private interview, is marked by them in greater or less degree; 
and shall we lay them aside in meeting either singly or collectively 
for the grandest and noblest act of which we are capable — the wor- 
ship of God. 

Man is a gregarious creature. He is born for society, in which 
alone his powers can be trained and developed. Social life is not a 
matter of choice, it is a necessity. Hence, he worships God in com- 
mon. The family was the first Church. It is a duty, therefore, and 
ever has been deemed so to take part in public worship. Now, reason 
requires that this should be done "decently and according to order" ; 
in other words, that there should be a fixed ritual, that all are bound 
to follow. The rites and ceremonies that made up the ritual of 
the old dispensation, as well as those that prevail in the Church 
to-day, form the rule that all are bound to follow. It is, therefore, 
a breach of the duty we owe to God to worship Him by unauthor- 
ized rites. The Church authorized by Christ, our law-giver, claims 
to regulate all matters touching not only doctrines, but ritual. 

We may sum up the outward duties of religion binding on Catho- 
lics under these heads, prayer, holy Mass and regular frequentation 
of the Sacraments. Though called outward, they must proceed 
from inward devotion. This devotion is their very soul and life. 
If there is no belief — no conviction of a divine presence — and worse 



66 DUTY 

still, if there is positive evil in the heart, either in object or in 
motive, then our semblance of divine worship is but a hollow 
mockery. We offend, rather than propitiate. Almighty God. 

Prayer is the oldest and most instructive form of worship. To 
invoke God in need and in trial, to praise, bless, adore and call on 
Him in trouble, to raise the mind, or turn the affections toward Him, 
are forms of prayer binding on all as a necessary duty. To engage 
outwardly in this exercise, either jointly or privately, every morn- 
ing and night, is by custom looked on as a duty. Indeed, few good 
Catholics feel easy in mind if they wilfully neglect their daily 
tribute of prayer and praise to Almighty God. Apart from the 
word duty prayer is the very breath of the soul. It is a vital practise 
to those who would live to God. A man who has renounced prayer 
practically declares himself devoid of divine life. 

The second great outward duty we owe to God is the devout 
hearing of holy Mass on all Sundays and holidays. The sacrifice 
of the Mass is the highest and holiest act of divine worship in which 
a creature can take part. At all times sacrifice was deemed the 
main, public and social act of homage to the Creator. It can be 
offered to God alone in recognition of His supreme dominion over 
all creatures. Hence, the death of the Victim or destruction other- 
wise of the matter of the sacrifice, was effected to show God's 
supreme rights over all living beings. I do not speak of the inward 
sacrifice of prayer and self-immolation, common to all times and 
places, but of the grand, external public liturgical act shown under 
the name. It was practised in all religions, true and false. It is out 
of place in a discourse on duty, to speak of the nature, origin and 
value of the august act of worship known as the Mass. The 
sacrifices of the old law have been abolished; and the Mass, per- 
petuating the Sacrifice of Calvary, now sums up in one grand mys- 



OUR DUTIES TO GOD 67 

tic act the whole essence of public worship ; and is daily offered the 
clean and new oblation, "for the living and the dead, all the world 
over from the rising to the setting sun." Every word, every cere- 
mony, every vestment worn by the officiating priest, is pregnant 
with meaning. The central act of offering, made by Our Lord at 
the last supper when He commissioned His first priests to "do 
this in remembrance of Him," enlarged, arranged, adapted to suit 
all times and places, is ever the same. Whether we assist at it in 
a lonely hillside chapel or are present at a solemn high function in 
St. Peter's at Rome, the obligation of hearing holy Mass, as the 
chief act of supreme worship, is one of the six principal laws of the 
Church. Unless we are excused by some pressing and valid cause 
we are bound to be present at holy Mass on Sundays and holidays 
under pain of grievous sin. The dispositions we are to bring with 
us, as reason and faith suggest, are reverence, attention and devo- 
tion. The Mass is the center and sum of public worship. All the 
outward splendors of religion — all the pomp and ceremony we can 
command — all the gifts of gold and silver — all that art and piety can 
afford are brought to adorn the altar whereon it is offered and the 
edifice wherein that altar is enshrined. 

Religion is a tie that binds man to God. Now this union with 
God — forming what is called the divine or supernatural life of the 
soul, is effected by grace, the channels of which are prayer and the 
Sacraments. Hence the administration and reception of the Sacra- 
ments form a very important function and duty of our holy re- 
ligion. To keep in touch with infinite God we must not merely 
pray and hear holy Mass, but devoutly and regularly frequent the 
Sacraments. In a spiritual sense they are to us sources of air and 
light, and food, and drink. "Ye shall drink water with joy from 
the Saviour's fountains." "He that eateth this bread, this mystic, 



68 DUTY 

Sacramental bread, shall live forever." Needless to add, therefore, 
that one of our main duties to God is preparation for, and worthy 
reception of, the Sacraments. When we lapse from our baptismal 
grace into grievous sin, there is one sole means for us of restoration 
by repentance, effected in the Sacrament of Penance, or, as it is 
usually called, Confession. But this union, effected in Confession, is 
perfected, consummated, in holy Communion, the Sacrament of the 
Eucharist. A table is spread in God's house — the new manna, the 
bread of Christ's body — laid on this table or altar in holy Mass 
is distributed to all who choose to come. By command of the 
Church we must, as a matter of strict duty, receive these two Sac- 
raments at least once a year; but anyone who is conscious of his 
many spiritual needs, and the loving goodness of God, will make it 
at least a duty of love to approach them frequently, especially when 
in need; e. g,, after lapse into sin. Daily Communion is now the 
practise of the choicest souls in God's Church. The body needs 
daily food, and we pray God to grant it, why not the soul? The 
confessional is ever open and the eucharistic banquet spread, and 
all, even the lame, and the halt, and the blind, are invited to enter. 

So important a part does the worthy and regular approach to 
Confession and Communion take in the discharge of our obligations 
to Almighty God that the practise has popularly acquired the name 
of "going to one's duty." 

We have now touched in brief outline the chief duties we owe 
to God. They are by far the most important and binding of all. 
If we are false to God, debtors to Him and fail to accept the com- 
promise He offers, what will all, what will even life itself, avail. 
They are summed up as you have heard in the word worship, 
both in its internal and external aspect. What that worship is we 
are not left in doubt of by our guide, both in its doctrinal and prac- 



OUR DUTIES TO GOD 69 

tical side. Glance at your Catechism, or prayer book, and there 
you will find that we discharge our duties to God by keeping the 
first three Commandments, further summarized, we may say in 
practising in their full extent, the three divine or theological vir- 
tues of Faith, Hope and Charity. This is the service of God — 
the observance of our duty to Him. "Be ye therefore doers of 
the duty, not hearers only." Carry out these three commands and 
prove your possession of these divine virtues by the lifelong prac- 
tise of daily prayer, Sunday Mass and regular approach to Con- 
fession and Communion. 

How little people think and what little sacrifice they make in the 
discharge of the all important duties of piety to God! To say 
nothing of private, or interior worship, or vocal prayer, how sadly 
they neglect even outward worship! What trifling excuses will 
justify them in their own eyes from going to holy Mass and the 
Sacraments. The very people who will face a blizzard to go to a 
theater, or a circus, join in a dance, or a card party, will stay away 
from church, even on Sundays on the flimsiest pretext of weather, 
health or convenience. And why ? Their heart is in the world ; 
not in God. They love the creature and forget the Creator. Learn 
that the shortest and easiest path to duty is the path of love. Love 
needs no dry formal precept — no force, no violence to obey, i. e., 
to be dutiful. Hence Our Lord and Master teaches us that the first 
command of all — the main duty of life is love. We would then 
faithfully comply with our duties to God. Love Him. All rocks of 
difficulty — all hardships on the path of duty — melt away before love. 
Love is duty, or rather hard, dry duty melts into love. "He that 
loveth God delighteth in His Comandments," i. e., actually finds a 
pleasure in doing all that duty to God requires of him. 



7© DUTY 



VIII. DUTIES TO PARENTS 

The oldest, firmest, and most enduring social unit in this world 
is the family. It has, in some form or other, weathered every 
storm, and therefore, seems to be a divine and indestructible organ- 
ization. All other social bodies, tribes, nations, church even, 
are but agglomerations of families. The very word family, has 
something of a sacred character about it. From the various com- 
plex relations of its members, all duties arise. Even those we owe 
to God are first probably awakened by the practise of duty to 
parents. Nothing gives a higher or more tender idea of God, than 
to say that He is the common Father of all. Hence the most inspir- 
ing of all prayers is the Our Father. Devotion and loyalty, and a 
keener perception of their influence on our lives, are imparted by 
the application to our Lady and the Church the endearing title 
of mother. 

Having spoken of the special duties we owe to almighty God, it 
is but natural, then, that we should next deal with those we owe our 
parents, who, in a manner, shadow forth to us and represent "Our 
Father in Heaven." 

As we observed, the spring or well-head, of all duty, is the law 
of God, summed up in the Ten Commandments. Parental authority, 
therefore, derives its force and sanction from divinity. Wherever 
there is a right, there is a corresponding duty to respect that right. 
God's right to our duty comes first, and hence the first table of the 
law contains the duties we owe to Him, in three Commandments. 
The remaining seven point out the duties we owe our neighbor. 
Now, the nearest to us, in kin and rank, come our parents; our 



DUTIES TO PARENTS 71 

duties toward whom hold the first place in the second table of the 
law, "Honor thy Father and thy Mother." 

Never, perhaps, was it more necessary to insist on parental rights 
and filial duties than at present. What with growing loose views 
on marriage, and the consequent weakening or breaking of family 
ties ; the advance of Socialism ; the invasion by the State of parental 
rights and other causes, the just authority of parents over their 
children seems declining; while filial piety is disappearing. And 
yet, the rights of parents are inalienable. They are but a transfer 
of God's, so that the duties of children, to love, respect and obey 
their father and mother are unquestionable. 

I. Duty in the abstract, is vague. It seems to hang in the air, 
till specifically applied. A concrete rule of conduct, indicating a 
single point of duty, with time, place and manner of fulfilment 
come home to us impressively. Such is the duty of children to their 
parents. Though it occupies a vast space in the field of ethics, and 
has a wide range of application, yet in its primitive sense, as 
we use it here, it is limited to the practical, every-day duties we 
owe to our father and mother in the flesh, by virtue of the fourth 
Commandment of God. 

To understand the actual force of this precept, before indicating 
the duties it imposes in detail, it may be observed that the whole 
idea of duty in the infancy of the human race, just as in our own 
infancy, was summed up and limited to what parents exact in their 
homes. In patriarchal days, all law imposing duty sprang from 
the parental will. The head of the family was father, king, priest 
and teacher, all in one. The complex distinctions since introduced 
by the spread of the race were quite unknown. Family relation- 
ship was the source of all duties. Divine authority, so to say, cen- 
tered in parents. What we now name codes of law, whether civil. 



72 DUTY 

ecclesiastical, municipal or military — all duties, in fact, pressing 
upon us by rules of conduct not originating in self, had their roots 
in the authority granted by God to parents. Hence, the sins we 
commit by rebellion against our lawful superiors, whether in school. 
Church or State, are sins against the fourth Commandment. The 
word father has enlarged its meaning, and embraces all to whom 
a share in parental right is extended, and to whom, consequently, 
a share of filial duty is owing. All terms signifying rulers, such 
as masters, teachers, pastors, governors, and the rest, were all once 
implied in the word parent, whose authority they shared. But the 
real and ultimate fountain of all authority is God, hence named 
"Father Almighty." His will, formulated in His law, is the basis 
of all duty. 

Coming to the Commandment that occupies us to-day, we are 
ordered by God to honor father and mother. Now what is honor? 
Broadly speaking, it is the esteem or value set upon worth or merit. 
To be genuine it must spring from the inward conviction of some- 
thing in the object deserving of our esteem. Without it mere 
outward tokens of respect are hollow. It is our duty to render 
supreme honor to almighty God — calling it adoration in the high- 
est and most restricted sense, owing to His infinite and superlative 
worth. All the duties of religion laid down in our previous dis- 
course are but rendering to God due honor. 

In like manner we fulfil the duties we owe our parents, by ten- 
dering them due honor. God, the supreme Father of all, has trans- 
ferred to them a share in His paternal rights; and on these trans- 
ferred rights is founded our duty. It matters not that parents are 
unworthy, vicious, utterly neglectful of their own duties. They 
never lose their inherently divine right to honor. As a parent can 
not be divested of his title of parent, so neither can he be deprived 



DUTIES TO PARENTS 



73 



of his right to this honor. A king is ever a king, even though a 
bad one. The divine authority is seen to shine through all duly ap- 
pointed authorities, even as the sun ever shines by day, though 
maybe obscured by mist or fog. Indeed, we are told in Scripture, 
to honor all men, just because they are men, bearing their maker's 
image, though dimmed and blurred through low and vicious living. 
They can not part with intelligence and free-will, and our common 
brotherhood imposes a duty of honor toward all who share those 
God-like powers. What more degrading sight than a fallen speci- 
men of womanhood, sunk to the depths through drink and lewd 
living; and yet, our common humanity dare hardly refuse a meed 
of honor, mingled, though it be, with pity and disgust. 

A mansion in decay, an old ruined temple to the false gods — 
a battered coin, with the defaced image of some old dead ruler — 
inspire a sort of respect akin to honor; and shall we question the 
right to honor of living parents, whose claims to it are the pur- 
port of the oldest command imposed by God on the race ? "Cursed 
be he that honoreth not his father and mother" (Deut. xxxii, i6). 
"Honor thy father and mother, as the Lord thy God hath com- 
mandeth thee, that thou mayest live a long time, and it may be 
well with thee in the land" {Ihid. v, i6). "Children, obey your 
parents In the Lord for this is just ... the first Command- 
ment with promise" (Eph. vi, 1-2). 

Now, this honor, this filial reverence, so rare nowadays owing to 
the conceit, frivolity and shallowness of modern youth, is really the 
straining of a reverent soul toward ideal fatherhood in God. We 
lose or forget the sordid representatives of paternity we often see 
on earth, in the ever-receding vision of our Father in heaven, 
whose will it is, notwithstanding, we should honor Himself in the 
beings, imperfect though they be, who bear the names, and whose 



74 



DUTY 



hearts beat with the love of father and mother. Personal unworthi- 
ness affects neither their rights nor our duties. It is the oMce, not 
the hearer J that we must look up to and honor in this case. Indeed, 
the compelling motive of obedience, a branch of this duty of honor, 
should ever be the divine authority represented to us in all lawful 
superiors, our parents more than others. 

But apart altogether from any express command to honor our 
parents, it is to them, under God, that we owe everything. We 
owe them life, food, clothing, care. Indeed, God alone knows the 
sacrifices that most parents make to see their children better off, 
happier, richer and more prosperous than themselves. The paren- 
tal instinct is the source of untold and often unrecognized heroism. 
Neither tongue nor pen has yet exhausted what parents do out of 
love for their offspring. Honor, therefore, to whom honor is due. 
It is the cry of nature, as well as the voice of God, and duty. One 
of the oldest monuments in the hoary East is Absalom's tomb, stand- 
ing in the Valley of Jehosaphat just outside of Jerusalem; but to 
this very day the people as they pass cast stones at it, because it 
is raised to a son who failed grievously in the duty — ^the honor he 
owed to his parents. Various forms of religion, politics, civilization, 
and philosophy have arisen and perished, yet one thing remains 
ever firm amidst the wreckage, and that is the belief by all men 
that filial piety is a duty — that all, in the words of the fourth Com- 
mandment of God, are strictly bound "to honor father and mother." 

II. We next come to examine the precise meaning attached to 
the word honor in this precept. The duty of honor to parents may be 
arranged under three headings — love, respect and obedience. 

If love is ever a duty, and the founder of our holy religion tells 
us it is the fulfilling of the law, surely it must be strictly due to the 
earthly authors of our being whom God has chosen to impart the 



DUTIES TO PARENTS 



75 



spark of life. If every heart is a center of love, which, like fire, it's 
symbol must spread, surely the first to catch its rays must be those 
nearest and dearest to us — part of ourselves — our own dear parents 
on earth. Love is the law and condition of life; let it cease and 
deatli reigns supreme. But love must have an object, and next 
to God, what worthier than our parents. The wildest and fiercest 
beasts apparently made for hate and war and slaughter, yet show 
love to their parents; witness how the cubs of the lion and the 
tiger gambol round and fondle their dam. 

In children when instinct gives place to reason, love is and must 
be an essential element of the honor due to parents. To cover the 
requirements of duty this love must be heartfelt and sincere. True 
love comes from within. Filial love must show itself in a feeling 
of affection, gratitude, and desire for their well-being and happi- 
ness, as well as in a life-long desire to avoid wounding their feel- 
ings or causing them pain. Children often expect everything from 
their parents and give nothing in return — not even the easy duty 
of love. They look only at their faults without a thought of their 
virtues, and sacrifice; and yet all true love, and above all, true 
filial love, is blind — blind, I mean, to defects inseparable from every- 
thing human. Moreover, love, like all earnest feelings, never hides 
itself in the breast; but proves its reality, by act and being. It 
is seen not merely in kind thoughts, but in kind words and kind 
deeds. A dutiful son who loves father and mother in the true, 
Christian spirit, will pray for them, help them spiritually and bodily 
in time of need, sickness and old age. It is a duty to see they are 
attended by priest and doctor, and have all the care that true filial 
love can afford. The duty of love should not' stop short at the 
grave, but see that a parent's last wishes are carried out; and due 
respect paid to his or her mortal remains. 



76 DUTY 

The next element in the duty of honor to parents, is respect. In 
the language it comes from, respect means to look back. It im- 
plies in dutiful children a regard, a looking to the wishes and views 
of parents in the regulating of one's conduct. Respect of par- 
ents implies a feeling of fear, mingled or rather tempered with 
reverence and esteem. It is a feeling somewhat akin to veneration. 
In its highest degree we both respect and venerate the very name 
of God, and all sacred things. So in the name parent there 
is a sacred element of fear, mingled with love and confidence. 
Well-bred children entertain a sort of reverential awe toward 
their parents. Even the tender love of a mother does not remove 
this. When they fly to her, and cling to her, it is as if she were to 
them a divine being. This feeling of respect accompanies a dutiful 
child all through life — urging him or her according to the circum- 
stances of age, time and place, to speak and act respectfully, even 
in the intimacy of family life, receive correction rightly and con- 
sult them in all matters of importance. Hence, no child out of 
respect for his parents will dare to mock, ridicule, or despise them, 
much less threaten violence, or, what is worse, actually raise hand 
or foot to strike those to whom they owe the gift of life. 

But of the three branches of duty involved in the honor we owe 
our parents, obedience is the best and surest test of its reality. 
Duty is the preservation of moral order. Now, obedience is the 
soul of this order. The peace and ordered life of families and na- 
tions depends entirely on how authority is obeyed. Socially and 
morally, disobedience spells disorder. The very test and touch- 
stone, therefore, of filial duty is obedience to parental authority. 
"Children obey your parents in all things, for this is well-pleasing 
to the Lord" (Coll. iii, 20) is the sweeping command summing 
up this point of duty, as given by St. Paul. Indeed, unqualified 



DUTIES TO PARENTS 77 

obedience is the hinge of all community life. Anarchy and misrule 
follow its cessation. Utter lack of it makes a man either a savage 
or a criminal, or both, and if we don't practise it early in the loving 
atmosphere of home, under the mild rule of fathers and mothers 
who love us even in correction, we shall have to learn it in the hard 
life-school of a cruel and selfish world. 

To carry out this measure of filial duty our obedience must be 
prompt, willing and exact. A truly obedient son and daughter will 
be only too pleased to afford proof of their filial love, by promptly 
complying with all the just and reasonable commands of their 
parents, without alleging endless objections and indulging in irri- 
tating delays, which mar, if they do not utterly take away, the merit 
of obedience. Fancy a soldier, or a sailor, or a servant, or anyone 
under authority, obeying, as many so-called good children do. Disci- 
pline would fall to pieces. The work of the various State services 
would collapse. And yet why should worthy children obey less per- 
fectly, less promptly from love than those moved only by fear, force 
or self-interest. 

Next, our duty of obedience should be discharged willingly. 
"God loves the cheerful giver" in obedience, as in other things. 
Our manner of obeying our parents should manifest the ready 
heart from which it springs. A work of duty should be a work of 
love, even when involving a high degree of self-sacrifice. Mur- 
murs of unwillingness, or volleys of excuses, prove that we have 
not yet learned the alphabet of the duty of obedience. 

Lastly, obedience to parents must be exact. Right is on their 
side. It is doing what we are ordered to do, and not what we wish 
to do, that will enable us to say, "I have done my duty," "I have 
rendered to my parent's the tribute of obedience due to them." 
Exactness is the soul of obedience; and exact obedience is disci- 



78 DUTY 

pline, without which the whole moral world would fall to pieces. 
It is the soul of law, order, life we may say, for life depends on 
absolute obedience to blind laws. 

Home is the best school ; and one of the most needful lessons that 
we can practise is exact obedience. It fits children for the after 
discipline of life. All life's training is a breaking of our will into 
submission to that of God, and to accomplish this, obedience under 
the name of discipline, must be strictly and sternly upheld. We can 
not escape obedience. We meet it at every turn in life. We must 
submit necks to the yoke. The only thing left us is a choice of mas- 
ters. Let us, therefore, begin by obeying the voice of God speaking 
to us through the just and saving commands of our parents, and let 
that obedience ever be prompt, willing and exact. Let us begin by 
being obedient in small things, and we shall be faithful also in the 
greater and larger things, "in which our whole life's happiness often 
hinges." 



DUTIES TO THE CHURCH 79 



IX. DUTIES TO THE CHURCH 

The soul of duty is obedience to lawful authority, obedience even 
when blind in matters not plainly wrong, is highly moral and 
rational. A soldier is praised for doing his duty, though acting on 
a wrong signal. "Into the jaws of death marched the six hundred" 
in dutiful response to an insane command. Authority may err — 
fallible authority, I mean — ^but never those whose duty it is to obey. 
Duty, even acting in the dark, as I said, is always right. Its justifi- 
cation is the will of one "having authority," and exercising it in 
commanding; and, because ultimately based on the will of God, 
commanding order to be observed in the conduct of life. This 
supreme will of His, extending through every department of exist- 
ence, is the eternal law of God. 

In this life we are subject to this law in a double sense, political 
and religious, natural and supernatural. We are subjects both of 
Church and State, or, as our Lord phrases it, "We have to render 
to God the things that are God's, and to Caesar the things that are 
Caesar's." We owe duties to both. They are both empowered by 
God to rule us within their respective spheres, but with this differ- 
ence, that we claim for the Church, directly, a divine origin and 
guarantee of permanency, and special aid in carrying out her wish 
of training men for a higher and better world. The State is for 
this life and world, and may vary in form, constitution and govern- 
ment, according to time, place and other circumstances. In both 
legally established authority is divine ; but in the State, its working, 
permanency, and application are human and fallible ; whereas in the 
Church they are sacred and infallible. 



8o DUTY 

I. We deal today with the duties we owe the Church. Why 
there should be a power in the world other than the State, and 
claiming rights against it, is not my purpose to explain. Our main 
object is to point out the exact duties we owe to the Church of which 
we are actual members. A word or two of explanation, however, 
about the function of the Church, may help us to understand these 
duties better. It might seem that duty is laid down clearly enough in 
the great moral law, traced on reason and indicating well enough 
for all practical purposes what we owe by way of duty to God, 
our neighbor, and ourselves, without the huge encumbrance of a 
spiritual state, always at war with the world we have to live in, and 
interfering with our soulbom liberty of thought, speech, and conduct- 
Now, my answer to this is, that the moral law, as revealed in reason, 
never did, never does, and never will suffice for man's spiritual needs. 
For mankind at large it was practically a dead letter, till Christ came, 
warmed and put life into it, and embodied it whole and entire in the 
religion He founded; which religion finds its only true, full, and 
adequate development and expression in the worldwide humanity- 
embracing Catholic Church. In the material order we live in, we 
need facts and persons in religion, not fancies and abstractions. On 
her doctrinal side, no doubt, the Church teaches us abstract truth; 
but hers is a philosophy, a wisdom, which, while it enlightens the 
head, does not leave the heart cold and empty ; for, she even teaches 
the way of God, in truth and "as having authority." When the 
critics, moralists, and divines, who lecture her so severely from 
without, have made up their own minds once and for all, amongst 
themselves, as to whether there is a personal God above us, or a 
responsible soul within us ; or whether we have any reason to fear 
Christ's "hard sayings" about death, judgment, hell and heaven, 
then, perhaps, shall we be tempted to compare their credentials 



DUTIES TO THE CHURCH 8i 

with those of the Church, to be our guide, "in the way of life." 
Meanwhile, it is safer and wiser to cling to the rock of Peter, 
though at the risk of being rated as unwise for doing so. "Give 
ear to me, you that follow that which is just, and you that seek 
the Lord: look unto the rock whence you are hewn, and to the 
hole of the pit from which you are dug out. Look unto Abraham, 
your father, and to Sarah that bore you" (Isaias li, i, 2). We are 
children of the Lord of Abraham. We are and will remain sons 
of holy Mother Church, and as such obey her laws; in other 
words, discharge our duties to her. She has maternal rights to 
our obedience, stronger, because directly granted by God, than 
those of the country or State we live in, and the laws of which, 
as good citizens, we gladly obey. She does not rule by the sword, 
by physical force, but in Christ's name claims conscientious ful- 
filment of the duties we owe her. 

Many, it may be said, lead lives of duty to God and their 
neighbors, are scrupulous observers of the moral law, who are not 
even Christians. Unitarians and agnostics, and others outside the 
body of the Church there are who, in their practical lives, put us 
Catholics to shame. But this fact, if true, is altogether irrelevant. 
The question is, did Christ found a Church, into which all are 
bound to enter, and did He impose corresponding duties? Apart 
from this, however, it is not by isolated cases we can judge a 
system. Good Samaritans are found everywhere, though "salva- 
tion is of the Jews," and "at Jerusalem is the place where men 
must adore." Many now rejecting Catholicism are living on its 
sap. A few isolated leaves, or even a large severed branch, may 
appear greener, healthier, and more vigorous than many on the 
tree; but they are cut of? from the stem with all that, and bear 
.within them the seeds of death. To work out our salvation, God 



82 " DUTY 

never meant us to live in detached and antagonistic bodies, but 
in one. The peculiarity of the great society, founded by Christ 
for this end, the Church, or Kingdom of God, as it is called in 
Scripture, is to make us feel our common brotherhood, that in 
Him "there is neither Jew nor Gentile," that all are one family in 
God. "Go, teach all nations," without distinction of race or color, 
is her commission. 

Duty to a Catholic, i. e., a worldwide church, is a necessary cor- 
rective of that narrow and exclusive patriotism which would 
confine our love of, and interest in, our fellow men within the 
limits of the territory we live in. It opens our eyes to a larger, 
wider, and holier brotherhood than that bounded by sea, river 
and mountain, the Church that is the common home and country 
of the nations. 

Like all other communities or States, the Church is a society 
founded for a common object, but not narrowed by race, clime, or 
territory. Though only one body of believers with head and 
members, yet is it rooted in the idea of the common brotherhood 
of men and fatherhood of God, with the "bounds of the earth as 
its inheritance." There is room enough in it for all other legit- 
imate societies, from the smallest family to the largest State. 
Men crave for unity with God and one another, and the Catholic, 
1. e., the universal Church, answers to this craving. The instinct 
at the back of socialism, the solidarity of the race in one conmion 
bond of union, can only be ratified when men do their duty to 
the Church God has planted in their midst, as an ark of salvation 
for all. This society is free and open to all who wish to enter 
under due conditions. The Church is no secret society, but vis- 
ible : a house raised on the hills, founded on a rock, and such that 
all may recognize her, and by submitting to her just claims dis- 



DUTIES TO THE CHURCH 83 

charge their duty toward her. In this life, good and bad, saints 
and sinners are found within the fold. She is a field wherein 
grow both wheat and cockle — a net containing fishes, good and 
bad — the ark in which were found animals both clean and unclean. 

Now, like all other societies, she has a sovereign right to frame 
and enforce laws for the benefit of the members at large. All self- 
governing bodies can impose duties on their members, and, therefore, 
why not the most perfect of all, founded by Him, who claimed "all 
power in heaven and on earth," and who said to her first rulers, 
"Whatsoever you bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven." To 
bind is to impose duties. He came to found a Kingdom, of which 
He is still the invisible head and ruler, carrying on His work and 
office till the end of time through its visible head, Peter and his 
successors. They are key-bearers, i. e., office-holders to bind and 
loose, to make and unmake laws, binding in conscience the better 
to be able "to feed his sheep and lambs." 

The Church is no mere ideal "reign of justice" on earth, framed 
in men's fancies, no mere Utopian or Platonic republic, but a real 
living, working, Divine state. She is not the product of human 
hands or brains, but fashioned by God. She is the "new Jerusalem" 
let down to earth from heaven, the ''cizntas Dei" or city of God. 
Though ideal and spiritual in her aims and her purposes, yet she 
uses, and must use, human means and persons to attain these ends. 
She has a body as well as a soul — a visible, palpable, human, and, 
therefore, imperfect side, as well as invisible and divine. She is 
eminently fitted for the office of training and fitting fallen 
humanity to regain the high estate from which it fell and making its 
members good citizens both of this world and of the next. Though 
the oldest, she is withal the most vigorous, of all social bodies. She 
has outlived all the political commonwealths that filled the earth at 



84 DUTY 

her birth, and now numbers more citizens in her ranks than any 
actual and undivided rehgious organization in existence. Say what 
her enemies may, the Church is no wreck, no mummy, no empty 
tomb, but "the Kingdom of God on earth," "the bride of the Lamb," 
without spot or wrinkle, "and ever ready to meet her spouse." 

II. Now, what, as loyal members of this Kingdom, should be 
our attitude towards the Church: in other words, what are the 
special duties we owe her? We call her, as she really is in our 
regard, "holy Mother Church," to whom we owe the same filial 
duties of love, respect and obedience that are due to our parents in 
the flesh. However, as our duty is mainly that of obedience, in 
which, indeed, duty chiefly consists, we shall dwell particularly on 
this point. It is the test and barometer of filial piety. A worldly 
son or daughter is false to the name, if he fails in obedience to his 
parents; and so is a Catholic, if disobedient to Mother Church; 
the more so, as she has inherited from her Divine Founder the 
power that was given to Him in heaven and on earth. Besides 
being Saviour, He was King and Legislator, and to His Kingdom, 
as a perfect, well-organized, social body, He granted the same power 
He had himself, of making laws that bind in conscience: in other 
words, of imposing duties, "He that heareth you heareth me, and he 
that despiseth you despiseth me." And just as in a well-ordered 
State, there are and must be, rulers and ruled — in a school, teachers 
and pupils ; so, in God's Kingdom, the Church, which is both a 
commonwealth and a school, there are rulers and subjects, teachers 
and taught, i. e., clergy and laity; or, as our Lord touchingly 
expresses it, shepherd and sheep. 

We all singly come into contact with the whole hierarchy or 
ruling and teaching power of the Church, in and through our own 
immediate pastor, duly sent by the bishop, who, in turn, was sent or 



DUTIES TO THE CHURCH 85 

deputed by the Pope, our chief shepherd, the direct lineal successor 
of St. Peter, made the rock on which the Church or house of God 
was built, and who was commissioned by Christ to feed His sheep 
and lambs. "I have prayed for thee . . . and thou, being con- 
firmed, confirm thy brethren." 

Now, the Church claims to keep the world straight in two very 
important points, faith and morals, i. e., belief and conduct. They 
are essential to our spiritual well-being; and experience shows how 
helpless unaided reason is to answer pressing questions, as to God, 
our soul, and our destiny. Hence, she has a double aspect, doctrinal 
and moral. Our first duty, therefore, once reason is satisfied with 
her credentials to lead men aright, is to submit to her guidance in 
the realm of faith or belief. We say guidance j because the Church 
does not originate or reveal Divine truth any more than a teacher of 
arithmetic reveals the truths of the science he teaches. Her function 
is to explain, determine, and bear witness to God's truth "as it is 
in Jesus." She is prevented by the Holy Ghost from error. The 
Pentecostal Spirit is still with her in her office of teaching and ruling 
the flock of Christ. To-day our Lord requires unflinching and 
unshaken faith in His person and mission, just as when "He walked 
on earth and was seen by men." To elicit that faith. He says, speak- 
ing of the pastors and rulers of His Church, "He who heareth you 
heareth me." Our pastors voice and personate Him in our regard ; 
and it is our plain duty to accept their guidance. Whatever be 
their personal gifts or characters, they stand to us as authorized 
teachers and expounders of Christ's gospel message. The Catholic 
clergy do not preach themselves, their private opinions, or virtues, 
but Divine truth and morality, as witnessed to by the Church at 
large. We do not attend a place of worship to hear the popular 
preachei of the day expound his views on the Trinity, or Holy 



86 DUTY 

Spirit, or the Incarnation, or the atonement, but the pure gospel, as 
handed down by its authorized guardians and interpreters. 

"Ubi Petrus ibi ecclesia," where Peter is, there is the Church; 
and where the Church is, there is Christ, who promised "to abide 
with her all days even to the end of the world." The Church is His 
body, and as such has only one head, the organ of His mind, whose 
voice to us is His. Christ Himself, no doubt, is the invisible head; 
but the successor of St. Peter is the visible and earthly head, to 
whom is entrusted the care of His sheep and lambs. 

The first duty of obedience we owe the Church, therefore, is to 
bend the mind to her teaching. It is guaranteed free from error in 
all essential points. Nothing more in accordance with reason itself 
than this submission to faith; as, like children in school, we cannot 
find out its truths otherwise. She knows her own mind and the 
limits of her commission in her pastoral office. To whom shall we 
go? As voicing Christ, she is to us "the way, the truth and the 
light." She does not hide, cloud, or obscure Christ, as her enemies 
says: she reveals Him. And just as Christ did not obscure the 
Father, but manifested Him to men, so does the Church "show fortU. 
Christ, till He come." There are spiritual cravings in our nature 
that we cannot still ; there are mysteries about our souls and bodies, 
in relation to God and the future, that we cannot unlock, if we seek 
not the key in holy faith. Our duty, plainly, is to choose God's 
appointed guide in this all-important realm of truth, "Obey your 
prelates and be subject to them" (Rom. xiii, i), "Remember your 
prelates . . . whose faith follow" (Heb. xiii, 7), to whom it is 
said "the Holy Ghost hath placed you bishops to rule the Church of 
God" (Acts XX, 28) in faith and morals, in true belief and right 
conduct. These are the two momentous issues on which our happi- 
ness here, and destiny hereafter, depend. The duty of mental 



DUTIES TO THE CHURCH 87 

submission is our sole safeguard. Jesus Christ, speaking in and 
through His Church, is the light of the world. All questions bearing 
on belief and conduct once decided by her are as a matter of duty, 
and happily so, closed questions. The truth of the Trinity, or the 
lawfulness of suicide, or divorce, are not open to discussion. Our 
duty is to obey the Church, to us "the pillar and the ground of 
truth." Divine faith, taught by the Church, is the highest form 
of certainty. Heed not those who say that her teaching, "cribs, 
cabins, and confines" the free soul of man. They know not what 
they say. All truth binds, and, as far as it goes, chains freedom, or 
rather, license of thought; so does school, so does discipline of 
every sort. It is "the truth that makes us free," free from error, 
doubt — all the mental ailments of the day. So far from obedience 
to Church checking true science, you may rest assured that the 
highest culture and most ennobling knowledge are quite com- 
patible, nay enlarged, by compliance with this duty. Faith is the 
complement of reason. The mind craves for, and gladly submits 
to, a light higher than its own. 

So much for the duty of obedience to the Church in her doctrinal 
aspect as authorized teacher ; but we must also obey her laws in the 
practical department of life, also. She has, like every other society, 
power to make laws suited to her sphere of action in the world — 
laws dealing with public and private worships — ^the teaching and 
spread of the gospel — ^the administration of the Sacraments and the 
rest. The law of the Church forms a special branch of study, 
called Canon law, and as her empire covers the whole earth and 
deals with a period of some nineteen centuries, we need not be 
surprised at its complexity and extent. The bulk of its contents 
deals mainly with particular classes and special circumstances, and 
hardly concerns the laity at all. It may be stated that as she herself 



88 DUTY 

has framed these laws, she may, like any other legislative body, 
change, modify, or abolish them. This does not apply, as is evident, 
to the fixed unchangeable moral law, summarized in the Ten Com- 
mandments or law of God. This she claims only to teach and 
expound, never to change, modify, or abrogate. No power on 
earth can dispense with the law of God in its moral and doctrinal 
side. 

As I said, the chief commandments of the Church, pointing out 
our practical duties to her, are reduced to six, and are really the 
application and development of some of the commands of God. 
Thus, the first of these duties, "to hear Mass on Sundays and 
holidays and rest from servile work," specifies the way in which we 
are to keep the first Commandment of God. The second duty, "to 
keep the days of fasting and abstinence appointed by the Church," 
points out how we are to fulfil the law of penance and self-sacrifice, 
specially enjoined by Christ. Though the Church may frequently 
modify or suspend fasting, or abstinence, yet her law, her second 
command, reminds us of our Lord's words, "Except you do penance, 
you shall all likewise perish" (Luke xiii, 5). "If any man will come 
after me, let him deny himself" {Ihid. ix, 23). Our third practical 
duty as Catholics is "to go to Confession at least once a year" ; and 
the fourth, "to receive holy Communion at least once a year at 
Easter." The power of forgiving sins and distributing the new 
manna of the Eucharist was entrusted to the Church; and, though 
recommending daily Communion, she determines the least interval 
that can elapse without our using this power. Repentance for sin 
is a law of Nature. The means to be used by us lies in the Sacra- 
ment of Penance. Our Lord Himself laid down the law of Com- 
munion, "Except you eat the flesh of the son of Man . . . you shall 
not have life in you." The Church merely enjoins the time and 



DUTIES TO THE CHURCH 89 

place of its fulfilment. The fifth duty of a practical Catholic is "to 
contribute to the support of the clergy according to his means." St. 
Paul enjoins that "they who preach the gospel should live by the 
gospel" (I. Cor. ix, 7), and this duty puts it into actual shape. 

The sixth and last of the commandments of the Church and of our 
chief duties is, "Not to marry within certain degrees of kindred or 
at certain seasons" ; a duty that reverence to blood relations, health, 
and respect for the great Sacrament of Marriage alike suggest. 

May she not, then, justly say in the name of Him who was at once 
her Founder, Law-giver, King and Mystic Spouse, "Tollite jugum 
meum super vos," "Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is sweet 
and my burden light." Her authority to impose duties upon us 
comes straight from the authority of God, fountain of all just rule. 
We are not our own masters. We are not free. The dent of the 
collar and the yoke is upon us all. Our very beliefs and opinions, 
our faith, in fact, whatever it is, is imposed by others. We are 
hedged in and hampered with laws and burdens on all sides far 
heavier than those of the Church — ^burdens, too, we can't escape. 
The yoke of religion put on us by the Church is neither galling nor 
intolerable. It sweetens all the bitter waters of life. There is in 
reality no truer, safer, broader, holier or larger life possible than 
what we may enjoy within the limits of the Catholic Church when 
we are dutiful subjects, or, rather, children. Every faculty of soul 
and body, every legitimate interest, every feeling and affection, may 
be nursed and developed to the fullest capacity within her fold. 
The long roll of pure, noble, unselfish spirits of every age, rank, and 
sex that adorn her history proves this. One condition is essential, 
and that is, whole-hearted discharge of the duty we owe her — 
obedience of mind to her teaching and conformity of conduct with 
her law. Duty to her is carrying out into practise our Lord's law 



90 



DUTY 



of life, "Seek, first, the Kingdom of God, and all else will be added/* 
A good citizen of God's Kingdom, the Church, is the best asset, 
even of the kingdom of the world. Be it then, ever our glory to 
love, obey, and defend our holy Mother Church. Her cause is 
God's cause. Her aim is to strengthen the Kingdom of God in our 
hearts — ^to train and fit us for His Kingdom without end. 



OUR DUTIES TO THE STATE 



91 



X. OUR DUTIES TO THE STATE 

From a Catholic point of view, a twofold authority under God 
rules the world — Church and State. Having dealt in our previous 
lecture with the duties we owe to the Church, we now proceed to 
speak of those we owe the State. Both have a mission from God, 
viz., to aid and guide us in working out our destiny in this world. 
The aim of the Church is mainly spiritual, that of the State, mate- 
rial. Both have claims to our allegiance ; and to each, in its sphere, 
we owe certain duties, binding in conscience, "Render, therefore, 
to Caesar the things that are Caesar's ; and to God, the things that are 
God's." Men are, by nature, gregarious and social ; and instinctively 
form themselves into ordered groups, a circumstance that brings 
with it rights and claims on the one hand, and duties on the other. 
Indeed, it is only in society, based on the recognition of mutual 
rights and duties, that man can develop the intellectual, moral and 
religious endowments, that raise him to such a dizzy height above 
the other creatures of the earth. Isolated, he could never protect 
himself against beasts of prey, or the forces of nature, arrayed 
against him. Some form of combined union, therefore, is a neces- 
sity. But any union for a common purpose needs rules or laws, 
thus implying duty, on the part of its members, to keep those laws. 
Without civil government, another term for an ordered state, 
violence and anarchy would reign supreme. And just as any kind 
of law is better than no law, so any kind of fixed and ordered state 
rule is better than none. So necessary is compliance with the duties, 
justly imposed by the State, that in cases where appeal to con- 



92 DUTY 

science and a sense of duty fails, resort must be had to violence and 
force. Sad, indeed, is the condition of a community where "No 
king reigns and each man does what seems right in his own eyes." 

Any kind of social body living under fixed rules, customs or laws 
is a State, or the nucleus of a State. The oldest form of community 
or State was, presumably, the family, or a group of families, form- 
ing themselves into clans, tribes or nations, for mutual protection 
and help, under the oldest, wisest or strongest members as heads or 
rulers. In the patriarchal State, so often alluded to in the Bible, the 
head of the family was often king, priest and law-giver in one. The 
family, therefore, is the original germ or unit of the State, howso- 
ever complex and extended it may afterward grow into. 

Hence, the fourth commandment of God, in laying down the love, 
respect and obedience we owe to our parents, is the source of all 
codes of law for the government of men in all departments of life. 
Our duties to the State, therefore, are rooted in our duty to God, 
who must will ordered life, and, consequently, some form of State. 
There can be neither peace, progress nor reform, social, moral or 
religious, unless in a community, bound together by law, inspiring a 
sense of duty. Hence, St. Paul says, "Let every soul be subject to 
higher powers, for there is no power but from God. . . . There- 
fore, he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God. 
Princes are not a terror to the good, but to the evil" (Rom. xiii, i, 
2, 3). Whatever, therefore, the actual form of a government, 
whether monarchical, imperial or democratic, whether it be a repub- 
lic, a kingdom or an empire, whether vested in one or many, it is in 
its ultimate source and present right to rule "of God." That there 
are bad, tyrannical, unjust and corrupt governments is no more an 
argument against all government, than the existence of bad parents, 
husbands and priests is a proof against the divine origin of the 



OUR DUTIES TO THE STATE 93 

family and the Church. Hence, all efforts to replace, destroy or 
radically change what we call "the State" are doomed to failure. 
Anarchy is not only a crime, it is absurd and impossible. If pos- 
sible at all, it would be "hell let loose." Outside of prisons and mad- 
houses men, as a body, believe in law, and the duty of obeying it 
both in rulers and ruled, i. e., they believe in "the State." 

I. Now, in what does our duty to the State precisely consist? 
As this duty resembles that which we owe our parents, because the 
State is but an extension or enlargement of the family, it may be 
summed up under three headings: loyalty, respect and obedience. 
Loyalty to the State is somewhat akin to the duty of filial love. It 
may be loosely described as enlightened patriotism. The land we 
live in as citizens, either by birth or adoption, should be dear to us, 
as house and home. God has, so to say, parcelled the world out 
amongst His children; and just as we set a special value on the 
house, land or other property we rightly call our own, improve it, 
turn it to account and otherwise take a deep interest in it, so should 
we of the country God has given us as our common inheritance. 
Our membership of it is part and parcel of the talent entrusted to 
our care, and of which as being a duty we must render an account. 
The love of country, the unselfish use of any political power we 
possess for her benefit, is a distinguishing feature of every generous 
mind. Nay, more, it is a duty. Some may boastfully call themselves 
"citizens of the world," but surely none can be so dead to human 
feeling as not to have a special corner in his heart for the land that 
gave him a name; as well forget in one^s love for the race at large 
one's own home and fireside and the faces that shine there. The 
man who is no lover of his country, i. e., who fails in his duty of 
loyalty, who is ever ready for gold or title to corrupt, sell or enslave 
her, is rightly branded as a traitor and a parricide. 



94 DUTY 

Though this duty of loyalty, regarded as patriotism, mainly re- 
gards one's country, rather than the government actually in power, 
still we must not forget that both together form "the State/' to 
which we owe allegiance. Even when power passes into usurping, 
corrupt, weak or incompetent hands the duty of loyalty does not 
cease. It binds us to do our best to reform, change or otherwise 
aid in "mending or ending" without violence or lawlessness, stand- 
ing abuse of power or hopeless disorder. For "the State" which 
claims our loyalty as a duty, is, in its fundamental aspect, a more 
permanent entity than any fleeting party in power. Democrats and 
Republicans may both be deeply loyal to the State, even when striv- 
ing for mutual overthrow. 

This duty of loyalty is rooted, as I observed, in the love we ought 
to have for our motherland, and is, therefore, placed on the same 
footing as filial piety to parents. Now love is the great motive- 
power, the strongest stimulant to duty, and what more natural than 
to love one's country. What duty, consequently, can be easier than 
loyalty to her, inasmuch as it is the form that true love of country 
assumes. 

II. The next duty we owe to the State is that of respect. To use 
this word nowadays, in relation to government of any kind, is 
"crying in the wilderness," so rampant everywhere is disrespect for 
all authority. It is an age of irreverence and criticism. The duty 
of the modern citizen toward all "clad in authority" would seem 
rather to be one of studied hostility, disrespect and contempt. The 
State, in his eyes, is often a mere butt for slander and ridicule. 
Now, this surely is a wrong, if not a sinful, attitude. We must be 
governed in some way or other and by some form of State. As a 
semblance, at least, of respect must be shown to authority out- 
wardly, why not make it an inward tribute to duty as well. Sys- 



OUR DUTIES TO THE STATE 95 

tematic abuse, obloquy and unfair criticism do no good, and may 
do much harm. 

To us Catholics respect for authority is a matter of principle, for 
it is founded on respect to God, the source and fountain-head of all 
authority. It is the embodiment and representation of His almighty 
will and power. Hence, there is a divine element or sanction in 
every duly authorized governing body, inasmuch as it shadows forth 
this authority of God. This respect that authority engenders begins 
in early years in the home, and thence by easy transitions passes 
to other and wider forms of it than parental. This respect, if duly 
fostered, becomes a duty. The accidental defects inherent in all 
things human can no more destroy the essential respect we owe the 
State than the well-known and often glaring defects of many 
parents can rob them of their rights to the respect due to them 
by us, as bestowed on them by the fourth commandment of the law 
of God. 

Lack of due respect to authority is a marked sign of shallowness 
and ignorance. The very words, law, order and ability to enforce 
them, should inspire and command respect. Life, property and 
honor are in the keeping of the State. Respect for the State is 
their safeguard. It is for the criminal and the law-breaker to vilify 
the State, not the free, law-abiding citizen. Indeed, respect for the 
State is but an enlarged form of self-respect, without which, as we 
know, a life of high principle is impossible. The State is a magni- 
fied mirror of ourselves. To despise and infringe the laws that 
regulate our own bodily and spiritual well-being is sinful. An 
abuse of self-authority is an offense against God ; so, too, is an abuse 
of the outer and larger self or State authority. 

III. The third main duty we owe the State is that of submission 
or obedience in letter at least to the law of the land. God's right to 



96 DUTY 

our submission is shadowed forth in parental or any other legitimate 
form of human authority. What we call free service is simply 
willing obedience to almighty God who rules and guides us not 
directly and in person, but indirectly through the authority vested 
in parents, the Church or the State. God is, therefore, the source 
of, and gives sanction to, all authority, law and duty. They who 
scout the very name and idea of obedience, who, in their hollow 
egotism boast they will serve no master, are but repeating the motto 
of the first rebel, "I will not serve," and thereby refusing to march 
under the banner of Him "who was obedient unto death." Law 
rules life in all its phases, and, therefore, implies obedience, forced 
or free. People can neither live, work nor combine together for a 
common purpose without rules or laws which are made to be kept, 
not to be broken. The very words, law, lawful and lawless, point 
out the need and sacred character of obedience. 

Even liberty needs law, and its enforced observance as its best 
and surest defense. A truly free country is one wherein law is 
freely respected and obeyed. Amongst a people that disrespect, 
disobey or defy the law there can be no security for personal liberty. 

It may be objected that State laws and their administration are 
often cruel, partial, one-sided and unjust. True, human law at the 
best is but a blurred copy of the divine, from which it derives its 
true force and sanction ; still it is well to remember that we cannot 
mend even an image of the divine by breaking it. Not to obey the 
law because faulty is as illogical and unwarrantable as to say with 
the agnostics that, because our idea of God falls infinitely short of 
the reality, therefore we need not worship Him at all. We cannot 
surely stop breathing because the atmosphere we live in is foul and 
foggy. 

So with human law. The State, it is true, has no guarantee 



OUR DUTIES TO THE STATE 97 

against error or injustice in framing its laws, and it is, therefore, 
wrong to make an idol or a fetish of any law not divine, withal, as 
"no man is judge in his own case," the law must be obeyed unless 
obviously unjust and against the law of God. Disobedience is an 
extreme proceeding, to be used, as we shall see, with great caution 
and under great reserve. 

Law, even in its lowest and rudest form, is meant to be justice 
embodied in practical rules of action. It is the dim vision of the 
"eternal law" of God, as recognized and displayed by us in our 
natural love of justice. The essence and first condition of a law, 
therefore, is that it should be just, rooted and foimded in justice. 
This it is that makes obedience safe. An unjust law is a misnomer, 
it can hardly be called a law at all any more than a crooked stick 
» can be called a straight ruler. The well-head of all law, imposing 
just obedience, is the eternal law of God. He, as supremely just 
and rational, can only elect to bind His rational creatures to certain 
lines of conduct or action, not arbitrarily or tyrannically, but in con- 
formity with and for the perfecting of their nature. Hence, in so 
far are human laws just and worthy of the name of law, inasmuch 
as they follow the moral law or law of God. Man is ethical, or 
moral, and such also must be his law. Wo to the country where 
the fountain-head of law, the source of social order, is poisoned or 
corrupt. There is positive danger, therefore, to true liberty and 
enlightened progress in a godless State. For above the State, and 
regulating its code of law, is the moral law and its unerring ex- 
pounder, the Church. Can we wonder that certain peoples and 
nations, under unfair treatment, hate the sacred name of law, see- 
ing that it was never to them an instrument of order and progress, 
but a scourge and disaster. Ireland and Poland bear witness to this. 

Hence, we find the Church so often in conflict with the world and 



98 DUTY 

its rulers. Her vision of eternal law and justice and true righteous- 
ness is keener than theirs. Though ever a bulwark against lawless- 
ness and every form of sedition and disobedience, yet, as her history 
proves, she does not hesitate to stand up in defense of the weak and 
oppressed, "against principalities and powers and the rulers of 
darkness in high places." Like her Lord, she ever proclaims with 
no uncertain voice, that whilst "rendering to Caesar the things that 
are Caesar's," we must not overlook God's rights in "rendering to 
God to things that are God's." 

May we then resist the law with a safe conscience, you will per- 
haps ask? Have people, who deem themselves unjustly ruled, the 
right to secede? Is there such a thing as the sacred right of 
rebellion? Can we hasten the certain dissolution of a corrupt and 
decaying power? We may, perhaps, best answer this set of ques- 
tions by asking another. May a man legally commit suicide when 
in danger of death? May children strike, rebel against or disobey 
their parents ? May we kill those we cannot cure ? Remember, that 
obedience to the State is an extension of the duties we owe our 
parents. And just as there are extreme cases wherein we may dis- 
obey and even raise our hands in self-defense against father and 
mother, so with kindred forms of authority. There is, and ever has 
been, such a thing as gross abuse of authority. Those who wield it 
may turn bad or mad, and, as a consequence, need putting under 
restraint. Nevertheless, disobedience or rebellion is an extreme 
and odious remedy that is never to be resorted to except as a sort of 
forlorn hope. Poison may, on occasions, act medicinally, but it ever 
remains a poison. 

The ideal remedy, when natural reason and justice fail, would be 
appeal to the great central spiritual court of Rome, where alone 
brute force and animal passion get no hearing. Failing this, how- 



OUR DUTIES TO THE STATE 



99 



ever, we must muddle on, through strife and hate, to a mere "vision 
of peace." 

To justify rebellion against a State, four conditions are required 
seldom found united, and, in constitutionally ruled States, perhaps 
never. 

(i) When the government of a country is hopelessly and in- 
curably corrupt, pursuing only selfish and personal ends to the 
neglect or abolition of the civil and religious rights of the people. 

(2) When all legal and constitutional means of redress have been 
tried and failed. 

(3) There must also be some reasonable hope of success, else the 
movement may end in slaughter and disaster. What can an un- 
trained or unarmed mob do against a trained soldiery? 

(4) When the need of reform and resort to violence for secur- 
ing it are proposed not by a small and hotheaded, but by the larger, 
better and more intelligent section of the community. 

In a free country, however, disobedience to the law, much less 
rebellion, is hardly, if ever, justifiable. The people have the govern- 
ment they wish for and deserve. Besides, in most cases, it is the 
administration, and not the law, that is at fault ; and this, a free peo- 
ple, by their votes can mend or end. In ninety-nine cases out of 
a hundred, revolution, or even disobedience, spells disaster, and is, 
therefore, a breach of duty. Constitutional methods, now within 
the reach of most people, are by far the safest, and, in the long run, 
the most effectual, means of redressing grievances. 

Happily, God, though transcendant, is yet immanent in His own 
world, and guiding all to some great infinitely just and good end. 
Justice, therefore, is ever the mightiest force in the world. Its 
march may be slow, but, like all great and true growth, it is sure. 
To force the pace of divine justice by violent means is but to uproot 



loo DUTY 

and weaken it. We can only hope that as nations advance in self- 
conscious and self-governing life, under the kindly rays of "the 
sun of justice," they will dispense with war and all forms of vio- 
lence, and both initiate and carry out reforms solely because, like 
God, our supreme Ruler, "they love justice and hate iniquity." 

In conclusion, therefore, let us obey, respect and be loyal to the 
State and its laws. In their origin they come from God, no matter 
through what muddy channels they may have been strained or 
passed. Let us specifically ever respect and carry out the law by 
ready obedience. It is part of the great debt of duty we owe to 
almighty God, and the whole of the duty we owe to the society we 
call "the State," which, whatever its defects, shelters, protects and 
defends us. We shall thus show by example that, whilst ever re- 
maining true and loyal members of holy Church, the kingdom of 
God, we are none the less, rather all the more, good, peaceful and 
law-abiding citizens of the State. 



PERSONAL DUTIES {SOUL) loi 



XI. PERSONAL DUTIES (SOUL)' 

Duty, like "charity, begins at home." "He is a wise man who is 
wise to his own soul," and, "What will it profit us to gain the whole 
world if we lose our souls," are words of deep meaning and true 
wisdom. Care of self, both soul and body, is not selfishness. On the 
contrary, when rationally carried out this care involves life-long self- 
sacrifice, the very opposite of selfishness. Our soul and body have 
personal rights, so to say, that impose duties on which I now pro- 
pose to speak. My remarks to-day will be limited to what is due, 
on our part, to our souls. Though in some quarters a great deal is 
said and written about soul-culture, yet the most of us are so im- 
mersed in bodily and material cares as sometimes almost to forget 
we have a soul. And yet the soul is self. We are really our souls, 
not our bodies, even, when living exclusively for the body. Our 
eyes without the soul are blind; our ears without it are deaf; the 
most perfect bodily organs without a soul are but dead flesh. The 
whole body in all its beauty, strength and perfection of form and 
mechanism is but an agglomeration of a few chemical elements 
knit together and kept in movement by the soul. We get fresh 
bodies every few years. There isn't a single material particle left 
in me of the helpless little babe that emerged into life in this planet 
on my first birthday. The very brain I now use as an organ of 
thought and aflFection I had not twelve months ago; but my soul, 
i, e., I myself, a thinking, living, responsible agent, is ever the same 
throughout those changes of my body and ever will be the same, 
even when my body lies "moldering in the grave." My soul or spirit 
will still go "marching on" in life. 



I02 DUTY 

The better to discharge the duties we owe to the soul, it it advis- 
able, by way of preliminary, to enter into our real selves, i. e., to 
study the nature of our own souls. To know oneself is to know 
one's soul, a branch of knowledge, declared by the wisest of the 
Greeks, to be "the first duty of man." 

I. Now, this self-knowledge, long hidden from the wise, and now 
laid open to "babes and sucklings," this lofty wisdom, is within the 
reach of the poorest and the most unlettered. We all learn, as 
children, that the soul is "a spirit, and immortal, made in the image 
and likeness of God." 

The soul is a spirit. It is neither matter, nor dependent on matter 
for action or existence. It is not light, heat, gas, or an electric cur- 
rent, which are all matter or material forces, divisible and perishable. 
However refined or subtle, all that falls under the impression of the 
senses is material, and subject to the laws of matter. Our soul is 
our life. We say, indeed, that the eye sees, and the ear hears ; but 
it is the great force called soul, that sees and hears through them. 
The eye, without the soul, is as dead as an opera-glass or a trumpet. 
It is true, beasts also live, feel and know ; but in a very different way. 
They are meant only for this world, living in, and wedded to, matter, 
depending on it ; never transcending it. They have no thoughts or 
mind impressions — only sensations. They know and distinguish 
this man or that with eye, ear, or nose ; but not man in the abstract. 
They cannot learn by ideas, or go to school ; nor have they conscience 
or any perception whatsoever of moral right or wrong. They can- 
not pray, or know God, or themselves, or past, or future. They 
live only in the actual impression of the moment. Being made for 
matter, they perish with their bodily organs. 

Our souls, on the contrary, know past, present and future. We 
remember and feel responsible for thoughts, words and actions done 



PERSONAL DUTIES (SOUL) 103 

in childhood. We think, and pray, and love, and distinguish right 
from wrong. Our souls are restless centers of energy, ever 
scheming, planning and looking forward to ever receding ideals, 
good or bad. To be a spirit is to be ever advancing, ever progress- 
ing, never to be satisfied with what it has, though drawn to matter 
and chained to matter; yet, it ever transcends it and is never to be 
sated with what a mere material world can promise or give. Its 
faculties and desires are boundless to such an extent, indeed, that the 
Infinite Good, very God, can alone fill them, "Thou hast made us for 
Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts shall not rest till they rest in 
Thee." 

Besides being a spirit the soul is also immortal, i. e., it will never 
consciously perish. By nature, it is not subject to dissolution, be- 
cause, unlike matter, it has not parts. It is one inseparable, indivi- 
sible unit of energy. Death is only a breaking up into the original 
elements of which a thing is composed. "Dust thou art, and into 
dust thou wilt return," applies only to the body, not the soul. God 
destroys nothing, not even the elements of matter, "the primeval 
dust," and much less the soul. For weal or wo, it lives and 
will live on forever. We instinctively crave for life, not death; 
at end of the longest and most strenuous life, we are only waking 
to the fact that we have not reached a tithe of our possibilities — that 
we are but just beginning to live. All ancient and existing beliefs, 
religions and languages, testify to the constancy of faith in a world 
beyond the grave. The grave itself, in the care taken of it, and pains 
bestowed in adorning it, is a silent witness to man's belief in im- 
mortality. A future world, where justice will be dealt out im- 
partially, has been ever deemed a necessary corrective for its 
absence in the present. Future rewards or punishments are the 
balance of life's inequalities. This world is the foreground of the 



I04 DUTY 

next, this life the prelude of another. In the world of matter, we see 
law and order throughout, all disposed in "number, weight and 
measure"; and we rightly feel that such must also be the case, 
eventually, in the world of spirits. 

II. From these endowments, or rather essential qualities of the 
soul, spring the duties we owe to it. We are taught in the first page 
of our catechism that "we must take more care of our soul- than of 
our body," another way of saying that the duties we owe the soul 
are far more important than those due to the body. And yet, is not 
the reverse of this the rule of most lives? The spiritual and im- 
perishable element gets overlooked, neglected, sacrificed, to the 
perishable and the temporal. The soul is life ; but this life is double, 
or rather, has a double aspect for believers, the natural and the 
supernatural. By nature we are intelligent and free, and it is part of 
our duties to train these powers. The culture of the natural life of 
the soul is a personal obligation. All lofty minds have recognized the 
training of mind, will and affection to be a duty of the natural order. 
But we live also by the spirit. We live the supernatural life of 
grace. We are called to a higher life. Hence, there are two sets 
of duties corresponding to this double aspect of soul-life. The first 
set of duties we owe to the soul consists in cultivating the soul's two 
great natural powers, the understanding and will. The power of 
conscience is only on application of mind to moral truth, and is 
included herein. Every being has to unfold and develop according 
to its nature and environment; and man, by nature, is an intelligent 
being — a soul, we may say. His mind and will, and by implication 
his heart and conscience, are part — in some cases the whole — of the 
talent entrusted to his keeping. Punishment swiftly follows; if 
buried out of sight, i. e., if left neglected or untrained. The duty of 
perfecting the powers of mind and will is called "education," a duty 



PERSONAL DUTIES {SOUL) 105 

deemed so important for our well-being, that in most countries it is 
now taken over, up to a certain point and age, by the State. Withal, 
it ever remains a personal duty, both at home and in school; and, 
in some measure, all through life. The mind is made strong and 
forceful by knowledge ; the will by character and conduct, a double 
process that should never stop. Divine knowledge and goodness, 
an ideal impossible to reach, are yet put before us in order to keep 
us striving and progressing. We have to work "whilst we have the 
day," "advance till the light of perfect day," "be perfect even as our 
heavenly Father is perfect." It is only by force of mind that man, 
physically so weak, holds an easy mastership over all other creatures 
of the earth. They cannot be trained or educated, except in a very 
limited degree. They lack mind, a power perfected and made avail- 
able only by education, broadly speaking. There is a wide gulf 
between trained and untrained minds. A savage and a modern 
scholar seem to belong to different orders of being; apd yet, it is 
only schooling that makes the difference. 

Education, in the narrow sense of the term, is by no means a 
panacea for all evils ; still, rightly applied, it goes a long way towards 
mitigating them. "The one thing great in man is mind." Human life 
is mind-life ; and yet, mind is useless without education. Mind and 
education are convertible terms. Life is a hundredfold wider, larger, 
more enjoyable and morally better in the case of the educated. 
Schools close prisons. Duty and good conduct are but the best 
phases of mental training. Even supernaturally, as we shall see, 
God acts upon the soul by grace, in and through mindj will and 
aifection. Christ was a teacher, so is the Church. Progress and 
development, in any direction, are forms of education. The first 
duty, therefore, we owe to the soul from a natural standpoint, is to 
train the intelligence by such education as we need in life, by good 



io6 DUTY 

use of the means within our reach. Young men who neglect their 
education, or idle away their time in school or other place of training, 
fail against this duty, and it may be, seriously. To say nothing of 
their sin of sloth and parental disobedience, they do themselves a 
grave personal wrong. Though not necessary to be a savant and 
take out a degree, unless part of one's profession, still it is each one's 
duty, in his own walk of life, to be well up to standard or pattern 
as is said. All should aim at winning a certificate of efficiency. 
Gold or silver may be genuine without a hall-mark ; but to most of 
us this stamp is the only proof; so in education. Indeed, there 
are very few professions in which ignorance is not a sin. It injures 
not only one's self, but may inflict untold wrong on others. The 
priest, the doctor, the lawyer, the teacher, may be guilty of grave 
sin through ignorance of their duties — in other words, through neg- 
lect of education. 

It is the duty of all men to learn their duties well, howsoever 
humble those duties may be. What we are in duty bound to know, 
that we are in duty bound to learn. We are all called to be perfect, 
not only in conduct, but in work, or rather our work in life is part of 
our personal duty. 

Moreover, education does not end with leaving school; we have 
all to keep going to school as long as we live. The best school is 
that of experience, which never closes its doors. We daily need 
fresh light, and this comes with experiences, aided by study. We 
are apt to forget what we have learned, to say nothing of what is 
being constantly added to old stores of knowledge. It is not enough 
to draw on what one has. If we don't keep adding, putting fresh 
capital into the bank of the mind, we shall one day find ourselves 
intellectually bankrupt. Whether as citizens or Catholics, therefore, 
it is our duty not to let the mind rust. If not careful to keep abreast 



PERSONAL DUTIES (SOUL) 107 

of the times in this respect, we fall behind in the race morally, 
socially, and financially. 

Though truth is mainly the object of mind, as goodness or virtue 
is of the will, yet the mind, or intelligence, too, is the seat of certain 
virtues. Indeed, the very conscience itself is the mind, dealing with 
truths relating to conduct. 

Now, two chief virtues have an important bearing on the mat- 
ter in hand — prudence and veracity. Both are intellectual virtues. 
They have their seat in the mind, not in the will. In fact, no two 
more pressing duties bind us in the care of our souls than to be wise 
and truthful. 

Prudence, or wisdom on its practical side, as we may describe it, 
means setting about things in the right way, working out desirable 
ends by the right use of the proper means. It is almost synonymous 
with common sense, the art of discerning practically, how best to 
promote our own interest or welfare and that of others. Prudence, 
being a cardinal virtue, must permeate and be the groundwork, as it 
were, of every other virtue. To be rightly virtuous at all is to be 
prudent. It comes into play in all departments of life, temporal and 
spiritual, worldly and unworldly. Our Lord tells us to be ''wise 
(1. e.j prudent) as serpents and simple as doves," and that, too, 
throughout the whole range of our affairs. Good sense and practical 
wisdom must no more fail us in the management of our temporal 
business and work than in saving our souls. Both make up the 
stewardship of which we have to render a strict account. It is a 
great help in this rough working world of ours, both to oneself 
and others, to display good sense. Show oneself tactful, and even 
worldly wise, in dealing with men and things. In the practise of 
this duty and of the virtue of prudence, it is well to remember two 
texts of holy Scripture, "The prudence of the flesh is death" 



io8 DUTY 

(Rom. xiii, 6), and "There is no prudence against the Lord" 
(Prov. xxi, 30). 

Another no less important duty to the soul is the intellectual virtue 
of veracity or truthfulness. Truth is the object, the very food of the 
mind; and any tampering with it is sinful and irrational as well. 
Speech is the soul of intercourse. It was meant to express, not to 
conceal, thought. The liar is the pest and plague of a community, 
it is impossible to protect oneself against him. 

This veracity must be both inward and outward. We often de- 
ceive ourselves. Through prejudice and wilfulness we judge not 
according to, but in direct opposition to, the light. We wish to be- 
lieve. There is often as great a lack of candor with self, as with 
others. Nowhere is this seen more than in matters of conscience, 
wherein others see the baseness or imperfection of our motives better 
than ourselves. We are simply blind, or, rather, untruthful. Pro- 
tests of honesty and straightforwardness often cover the most un- 
warrantable lying to self, as well as others. Inward candor is as 
binding a duty as outward, we should remember. Flattery is often 
the worst and basest form of outward lying. A real lie is never 
excusable; and yet it may be a duty of charity to dissemble, or at 
least keep silence, as to our real sentiments about others. Life would 
be intolerable if each thought fit to say out all he thinks rightly or 
wrongly about his neighbor. 

So much for the duty we are under, of training the mind and 
passive powers of the soul; but a far more important duty weighs 
upon us of training the will, the heart, the active powers of the 
soul, as we may term them. They have to do mainly with action 
or conduct. What we do is more important than what we know. 
A man of good will is more to a community than one merely 
learned or clever. Learning is nothing, or, at most, veneering; 



PERSONAL DUTIES (SOUL) 109 

character is everything. To do one's duty to the soul in training 
the will, or heart, is building up one's character. Conduct is a very 
complex thing, covering the whole field of action. Matthew Arnold 
has very truthfully said that conduct is nineteen-twentieths of life. 
It is by our conduct, /. e., the fruit of our will or active power of 
soul, that we are judged here and shall be judged hereafter. "Be 
ye, therefore, doers of the Word, and not hearers only," is a good 
scriptural rule in this matter. "Qui proficit in litteris et deficit in 
moribus, plus deficit, quam proficit," a saying akin to that of "the 
Imitation of Christ." "It is better to feel compunction than know 
how to define it." 

Thus far we have spoken of the personal duties we owe to our 
own souls in the natural order. But "the soul is naturally Christian," 
i. e.j supernatural. Mind and will are capable of higher things 
— a higher life — than that possible within the realm of nature. 
"The carnal man," i. e., the merely natural man, "understandeth 
not the things that are above." As experience shows, he is little 
above, often far below, the beast. Reason and merely natural love 
of goodness are powerless against the animal nature within. 

Hence, we reason that man was never intended for, and as a 
matter of fact, never was created in a purely natural state. To per- 
fect and enable him to develop the powers of his soul, a marvelous 
endowment, called grace, was bestowed upon him, and is still within 
his reach, by which he becomes a "new creature in Christ." The new 
birth, "the new man," made in the model of the ideal man, Christ, 
are terms that give us an idea of the supernatural life of grace 
into which we are born, in Baptism, from which we lapse by grievous 
sin and which we may recover, in the Sacrament of Penance. A 
new ideal is therefore opened out to the Christian, which responds 
to the higher and nobler aspirations of his nature. Nothing else 



no DUTY 

sates his cravings. The realm of nature, mere naturalism, as we 
may call it, never zvill and never can satisfy. Man tends to the 
Infinite, in other words, "the strong, living God," to be reached 
only in and through grace. 

What the nature of this gift is, is not our object to inquire. 
Enough for us Catholics to know that it is a doctrine of our faith, 
that we need this sublime gift to lead the "higher life," to which we 
are called and in duty bound. God is author of both nature and 
grace. A merely rational life, if such were possible in our fallen 
state, is not enough. We are asked to mount higher. A gift, 
superadded to natural reason, will and affection, lifting up the soul 
to a higher level, enabling it to lead a life and elicit actions, that 
we call supernatural, is within our reach. This imposes on us a 
new set of duties, which we owe it to our soul to discharge. They 
form what we may call our religious duties, and they all concern 
the preservation or recovery of Divine grace. This is the one vital 
element of soul-life; in fact, it is life, the divine life, in man. We 
must hold to it as dear life. To cling to it if we have it, and regain 
it if lost, is saving our souls. "What will it profit us to gain the 
whole world if we lose them." What will it benefit us to be in- 
vited to the King's Supper, "the banquet of the Eucharist, in God's 
house," if at the end we are without the wedding robe of grace. 
The duties, bearing, therefore, on grace, are of incalculable im- 
portance. 

Our first duty, as I said, is to win and guard what is known as 
habitual grace, i, e., to be ever in a state of favor, or friendship, 
with God. This is having God specially present in the soul — ^be- 
coming its life. It is also called justification. To win and hold this 
treasure, we must pray and frequent the Sacraments, as they are 
the great channels or fountains of this divine life, this "pearl of 



PERSONAL DUTIES {SOUL) iil 

great price," to which all else in the world, if needful, must be 
sacrificed. Daily prayer, attendance at holy Mass, regular attend- 
ance at Confession and Communion, both insure and strengthen 
it within us and, therefore, sum up our duties to the soul in its 
supernatural aspect. 

Should this state be lost by sin, grave sin, the death of the soul, 
as it is well called, our first and most pressing duty is its recovery by 
repentance, a repentance to be sealed and sanctified in the Sacra- 
ment of Penance. The first duty of a Christian, urgent beyond all 
others, even that of saving bodily life, is to make his peace with 
God, offended by sin; and this can be only effected by true, heart- 
felt repentance. So embedded in the minds of all is the duty of 
repentance for sin, present or past, joined to that of eating the 
Bread of life, in holy Communion, as a means both of regaining 
and keeping alive the life of grace in the soul, that on the lips of 
a Catholic going to Confession and Communion has come to mean, 
"Going to one's duties." They certainly yield to none in importance. 

Life, in its highest aspect, should be our main concern. We 
live, it is true, but how? Are we carnal-minded or spiritual? 
There is no middle course. Though men may, and ought, to de- 
velop and cultivate their natural powers, and so live up to the 
standard of reason, yet they do not. We must raise, refine and 
perfect our nature by grace. We have two sets of duties to dis- 
charge, as we have seen, to be just to our own souls. In the 
natural order we must train mind, will, and affection; but this 
training or education serves only in a good Christian as a stepping- 
stone to a higher. We have, further, to guard the supernatural 
life of our souls, by a higher class of duty, those that are summed 
up in the phrase "living up to one's religion." "Do this, therefore, 
and thou shalt live" in the full and perfect sense of the word. 



113 DUTY 



XII. HABITS OF DUTY 

By way of conclusion to all that has been said on the subject of 
duty, I would fain impress upon you to-day the absolute need of 
forming, what may be called, a habit of duty. To act on principle 
is to act on a habit of duty. To do one's duty in all the various 
relations of life only "by fits and starts," or in casual and isolated 
instances, helps us but little on the way of life. Loose stones, 
scattered all over a field, no more make a building than do stray acts 
of duty a dutiful man. What we call a good character is but 
repeated acts of duty, in one line or many, built up into something 
fixed, steady, permanent. How expressive is the phrase, "A slave 
to duty" ; yet, if we don't aim at something like this, we are merely 
playing with duty. To do our duty properly, it ought to become a 
necessity; and it can only become so by habit. Not that a habit of 
duty imposes constraint on the will, as determinists would say. All 
habits are freely acquired and are the outcome of repeated free acts. 
We cannot call seeing, hearing, thinking, or digesting our food 
habitual just because they are not under control; whereas, to 
work, to pray, to study, to be chaste, sober and economical, are, or 
may become, habits, for the very reason that they are free and not 
necessary acts. And yet, if we know a man's character, i. e., the 
habits he has freely formed, we can almost as safely predict his con- 
duct and end, as if he were under the spell of fatalism. Habit, 
therefore, we may say, within the realm of duty, fixes one's destiny. 

We must learn, therefore, to do duty by habit. Then only is duty 
trustworthy. If a man is good at anything, or for anything, he must 
be good by habit. We must try to grow into doing our duty 



HABITS OF DUTY 113 

unconsciously and automatically, as it were, just as we learn to poise 
ourselves on foot, on horseback or on bicycle, without hardly know- 
ing when, how, or why we came to do so. 

Both in mind and body we are all under the law, or rather the 
spell, of habit. We are its creatures and thralls. What we usually 
do, and the same is true of what we usually say and think, has a 
tendency to recur, so that acts of duty, by dint of repetition, grow 
easy and natural, or, if neglected, hard and almost morally impos- 
sible. The law of habit, in this matter, is, therefore, both a blessing 
and a danger; for it makes vice easy, as well as virtue. Like the 
god Janus, habit looks both ways. It is a double-edged sword that 
cuts on either side. It shapes both saints and sinners, men of duty, 
or men of pleasure. It hardens and fossilizes the one, till, in the 
words of Job, "His heart shall be as hard as a stone, and firm as a 
smith's anvil" (Job xli, 15), or strengthens the good element in the 
other till temptation loses almost all power over him. We can, 
indeed, truthfully affirm of all that they may lapse from duty ; yet, 
of those in whom the habit is deeply rooted, we are sure they never 
will. As soon might we expect the moon or stars to swerve from 
their accustomed paths in the sky, as for certain souls whose char- 
acters are set in habits of duty, to swerve from the straight course 
of righteousness : "A young man according to his way, even when 
he is old he will not depart from it." 

The matter of our discourse to-day will deal, first, with the power 
of habit in relation to duty ; and second, the application of this power 
to our own growth in habits of duty. 

I. Life is but a growth of habits. Our powers of body and soul 
represent the result of endless repeated acts. To stop using a faculty, 
i. e., to stop the growth of a habit, is to lose it. All trades and pro- 
fessions are mere habits. To learn a trade, or an art, or any sort of 



114 DUTY 

business, is just forming a habit. To play an instrument of music, 
to speak a language, to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a teacher, to 
walk, or ride, or swim, is simply to shape our habits in a certain 
direction, difficult at first, then easy, and finally automatic, almost. 
It is the same with the Divine art of doing one's duty. To be 
dutiful and good is to have acquired virtue, i. e., habits of duty; 
to be bad and worthless characters, is to have fallen under vicious 
habits, i. e., habits of neglecting duty. 

So powerful is the force of habit, in one way or the other, that it 
will actually turn downright repugnance and pain into pleasure. 
Look at the feats of skill and agility to be seen in a gymnasium or a 
circus that make us shrink and squirm to witness, so hard and painful 
do they seem. And yet they are but acquired knacks, mere tricks of 
habit. Touching on comparisons more in accord with our subject, 
an unaccustomed palate, as in the case of a child, or even an animal, 
will turn away with loathing from alcohol or tobacco, in both of 
which devotees to the habit revel with delight. So is it in the vital 
affair of duty. Habit alone can root it in the soul. In this matter, 
too, we are faced with a serious alternative, viz., the growth of 
vices. The soul of man is like a garden. If we cease to grow good 
and useful plants, weeds grow of themselves. They spring up 
unbidden. Sin or vice is the antithesis of duty — a breach of it. 
How pained and shocked we were at our first sin, our first conscious 
breaking away from duty. How the transgression of duty first 
stings and burns the untainted conscience as the remorse it awakens 
sweeps through the fallen soul like fire or plague. But let this 
breach of duty by sin become habitual, and it becomes not only 
easy but a pleasure. The abandonment of duty hardens into vice, 
or rather, vices, for sins go in groups, and by degrees crystallize into 
a set character. It is thus the devil's chain is wound round the soul, 



HABITS OF DUTY 



"5 



and we become "fast bound with the ropes of our own sins." God's 
forgiveness, it is true, we may be always sure of; but every fresh 
breach of duty weakens the will — lessens its power of resistance. 
The acts of sin involved in these breaches of duty grow into those 
habits out of which character is woven; and we know that under 
the sway of character for evil the poor will becomes well-nigh par- 
alyzed. A tree, when a sapling, may be bent, twisted and shaped 
as you like; but once full-grown and set, the very tempest that up- 
roots it and hurls it to a distance cannot alter its shape. Hence, the 
need of early training In habits of duty, if we are to escape the fate 
of getting "rooted in evil," when all that is left us is to cry out with 
St. Paul, "Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the 
body of this death" (Rom. vii, 24). For "habit," in the way of duty, 
or its opposite, "is a second nature" ; or, as St. Augustine expresses 
it, "Custom, unresisted, hardens into necessity"; "If the Ethiopian 
can change his skin and the leopard his spots, so may you also do 
well when you have learned evil." "A young man according to 
his ways, even when he is old he will not depart from it." Escape 
from the evil habits of neglecting duty is, humanly speaking, hope- 
less. As well might the struggling bird get free from the fowler's net, 
or the quivering fish from the baited hook, as we cast off the devil's 
fetters, when sinful pleasure, and not duty, is the law and measure 
of our lives. "His own iniquities catch the wicked, and he is fast 
bound by the ropes of his own sins." On forming a habit of duty, 
therefore, depends the loss or gain of life. To live in the only true 
sense of the word, is to train the conscience to act up to duty; in 
other words, to do right by habit, not by mere fitful impulse. 

I would here warn you as good Catholics against taking a part 
for the whole. By a habit of duty I do not mean the observance, 
merely, of some duty, but of all. The "whole duty of man," as many 



ii6 DUTY 

appear to think, does not consist in being a good citizen, or an honest 
tradesman, or a brave soldier, or keeping out of debt or jail. All 
this is only a very small fraction of the whole sum of duty. We must 
pay the whole debt of duty to the last cent. The doing so, or striving 
to do so, with God's help, is what we mean by forming the habit of 
duty. This is "fulfilling all justice," it is making "our justice exceed 
that of the Scribes and Pharisees" with which the world is still full, 
who seem to think that all duty consists in man's willing response to 
the bugle cry from camp, office, workshop, or field, quite oblivious of 
the fact that "these things they ought to have done, and those not 
left undone," that the habit of duty takes in the regular discharge 
in thought, word, and deed, of all that we owe to God, our neighbor, 
and ourselves. 

II. So much for the influence of habit on duty and its opposite. 
We have next to speak of its application to our own lives and those 
of others. It may well fill us with dismay when we reflect on our 
own habits and those of our fellow men, to note what a small space 
in our lives, duty, in the full sense of the term, occupies. We hardly 
ever, perhaps, gave the matter a thought, except in a very hazy or 
perfunctory way. And yet we are, and must be, individually, an 
agglomeration of good or bad habits. Each man has his character 
and ways; in other words, he is a tangled growth of habits. Are 
they habits of duty or of neglect of duty ? There is no middle course. 
If good, so much the better for us; if bad, is there any hope? Can 
we rise from the slough of despond, of neglected duty, to be again 
children of light ? Furthermore, is there any hope for the crowds of 
hardened sinners worse than ourselves, dead to all sense of duty in 
the Catholic sense of the term? We hopefully answer, yes. In the 
holy religion we profess there is no fatalism, no insuperable barriers 
of naturalism that ruthlessly bar resistance to habit, and entangle 



HABITS OF DUTY xxy 

poor sinners in the nets of their own weaving. We believe in free 
will, and, what is more, free will aided by grace. There is no 
unpardonable breach of duty, no criminal neglect of it, no habit of 
disregarding it, that the sacramental power of grace, joined to our 
own good will, may not reach and heal. We are not chained to moral 
goodness, neither are we, happily, to moral evil. If cripples through 
long neglect of duty, we may yet, at the Divine command, "arise 
and walk." 

There is no door closed against us that the keys given to Peter, 
and ever bright with daily use, will not unlock. There are no incur- 
ables whom the fountains, gushing forth the healing waters of life, 
cannot restore. Howsoever far one may have wandered from the 
path of duty, were one as deeply sunk in crime as the thief on the 
cross, the publican in the temple, or the poor degraded creature 
about to be stoned, could one say with David before his conversion, 
"My iniquities have gone over my head," yet, with grace, may he be 
saved and healed, and walk again in the straight paths of duty 
and righteousness. Habits of pride, anger, gluttony, and lust, 
may paralyze the will and extinguish all sense of duty to such an 
extent as to make all hope of delivery seem chimerical ; yet, there is 
no hopelessly fatal spell woven round the soul : "Dum spiro, spero" : 
Whilst there is life, there is hope. There is no hoary prodigal even 
"living on the husks of swine," wandering naked of virtue and deeds 
of duty, like the madman of the tombs, that may not yet "arise and 
go to his father," and get clad again with the habits of a dutiful 
son. 

Even apart from grace, the law of habit, as I said, cuts both ways. 
It has, therefore, an encouraging, as well as a discouraging, side. It 
tells powerfully as well in the casting off of bad habits, as in adopting 
new, so that under it "where sin abounded, grace may more abound." 



it8 duty 

To a great extent man is master of his own destiny. The shaping of 
his character is largely in his own hands. He is a plastic and adaptable 
creature, and, given the two factors of grace and free will working 
together, like horses in a team, he may guide himself in any direction. 
He can turn right round from bad roads to good ones. The first 
effort in the way of long neglected duty is hardest; but each suc- 
ceeding effort is easier. Every temptation to evil, resisted, diminishes 
the force of the next; and so on, till the habit of duty and self- 
restraint gains the victory over self-indulgence and neglect. The 
tendency of our nature, doubtless, is downward. The weight of flesh 
and blood pulls us to earth and earthly ways and habits ; but all the 
same we can, and by duty ought to, resist. "The lust," i. e., the 
desire of, or consent to, sin, "shall be under thee and thou shalt have 
dominion over it" (Gen. iv, 7). The growth and choice of habits 
is. In some respects, as much under our control as the crops we plant 
in our gardens and fields. It is futile, a mere attempt to escape 
responsibility, in fact, to say that we are powerless against passion 
and other evil influences weighing down on our weak wills. We are 
free agents. We control and select amongst conflicting motives, and 
so determine our own choice. We feel ever conscious, no matter 
how powerful the motive under which we are acting, that we are 
still its master, and can stop or go on with it at will. Hence, we are 
responsible for our habits, inasmuch as they are built up of our own 
free and oft-repeated acts. If bad, they were freely adopted, and 
can, therefore, be freely abandoned. And if we find "the world, the 
flesh and the devil too strong for us," the resources of Grace, i. e., 
the whole power of God, is at our command, "seeing," like St. Paul, 
"another law in our members fighting against the law of our minds," 
we may have lost heart ; but like him we can also say, "I can do all 
things in Him, who strengtheneth me." All our efforts hitherto. 



HABITS OF DUTY 119 

perhaps, to get back again to habits of duty and good conduct, may 
have ended in dismal failure and disappointment. But let us seek 
help from without. We live in God's Kingdom, and all its resources 
are ready in our defense. The forces marshaled in our favor are 
stronger and braver by far than those drawn up against us. The 
whole heavenly army is with us when we engage in sincere and 
earnest prayer. 

Most of us say daily, if not with heart at least with lips, the "Our 
Father," and at its close ask to be delivered from evil. Now, the 
saddest and worst of all evils is the habit of sin — the state of those 
who neglect their duty. Many there are who say this prayer with 
utter insincerity, not wishing to be delivered. They are thralls to 
sin, who hug and kiss the chains that bind them. Of them we can 
say nothing. God will not, and, be it said in all reverence, cannot, 
save them against their will. In the ordinary course of Providence 
the will is never forced, for it is free. But there are many waiting 
for the "stirring of the waters/' many who would fain cast aside 
their sticks and crutches and walk in the full light of day — act freely 
and habitually in the full discharge of their Christian duties. They 
feel rapidly drifting down the stream of tendency, that is set, "oppo- 
site to God." They feel hopeless or apathetic, and yet, by a sort of 
contradiction, long too for "the coming of the Kingdom of God," 
by His reign, through the habit of full Christian duty, in their 
hearts. Mere naturalism will not save them and cannot cure them. 
A life of grace, of sustained Divine help, is what they seek and need. 

"Unless your justice exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, 
you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven," said our Lord. But 
our justice, f. e., our goodness, our piety, rarely comes up to that of 
the Scribes and Pharisees. What can we do? Our Lord furnishes 
the answer in telling us of the new birth. But, "how can a man enter 



I20 DUTY 

his mother's womb and be born again when old," answered Nico- 
demus, doubtingly. This moral miracle, this utter change of habits, 
this new birth, is effected daily in those who cast aside the garb of 
sin and walk forth into life clad in Christ, ever acting from a sense 
and habit of duty — duty in its ideal and Christian standard. 

Let us, then, be up and doing. Let us pray for good will and ever 
cooperate with grace offered us. A noble and truly Christian 
character is the highest reward of a sustained habit of duty. It 
means peace, happiness — the Kingdom of God, both here and here- 
after. How hard people strive afeid toil to build a house, found a 
business, merely to leave a decaying and perishable monument behind. 
Shall we do nothing to build the house of God, found His Kingdom, 
mirror the likeness of His Son, the ideal man in our hearts. This 
can be only done by "putting off the old man and clothing ourselves 
with the new" ; in other words, let us uproot bad habits and plant 
new ones. This is the purpose and aim of all that has been said on 
the subject of duty. It is good to know its meaning and worth; but 
the really important thing is to do it, i. e., to carry out or fulfil 
all justice. This can only be effected by ever cultivating and acting 
out of the habit of dutjr. 



OCT 28 1910 



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